


Let's Refuse to Live and Learn

by malfeasance



Category: One Direction (Band), Radio 1 RPF
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Future Fic, Idiots in Love, Kid Fic, M/M, So Married
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-09
Updated: 2013-07-25
Packaged: 2017-12-18 06:48:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 34,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/876847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malfeasance/pseuds/malfeasance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nick has a kid.  Harry is their nanny.  This is not an AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> _FU, Nick Grimshaw with jorts and a pram. FU._
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> Thank you R and Emma for the beta and the secondary britpick for a long-time expat. All remaining mistakes are my own and concrit is obviously very welcome.
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> P.S. Sorry I excised you from history, Ian Chaloner. Just like British Wimbledon champions who are women, I guess (no, really. Nothing against Ian Chaloner; he and Aimee have just never made sweet sweet love in this universe (...until they do, I guess)).

**1**.

On the rare occasion that Nick is feeling introspective, he sometimes thinks, “Fuck, I never thought I’d be a dad.” 

Then he stops himself, because he absolutely did, not that he’d ever admit to the many daydreams he allowed himself to have mid-show while a record he really liked was playing.  Maybe it would be more accurate to say, “I never meant to father a child with my best friend because we were both afraid of dying alone, and it’s a right surprise how well it turned out, because instead of being a fucking train wreck it’s brilliant and my life has never been better,” but that’s not really very radio-friendly. 

Also, he tries to avoid admitting that he’s happy, just in case it gets taken away.  Or in case someone makes fun of him.  But mostly because of the first one.

When Aimee had whispered the idea to him, the two of them curled up under the bobbly blanket on her sofa, three empty bottles of wine on the coffee table in front of them, he’d known immediately that she was serious.  They were so drunk, a little high, but there was something about her quiet voice in the dark that let Nick know she’d meant it.  And he’d been surprised how much he’d meant it, too, how _quickly_ he’d meant it, when he’d fumbled his hand across the cushions to grasp her fingers and say, “We should do it, Aimes.”

It’s so fucking cliché it kills him.  Her hitting her mid-30s and him teetering on the wrong side of 32 and realising he wasn’t a kid anymore, that he didn’t have a boyfriend, that the most important person in his life was still practically a kid and had his whole life ahead of him, that this might be Nick’s best chance to _have_ a kid.  That he wanted a child, and a family, and someplace to belong.  That he had a surprisingly large number of friends for someone who mostly associated with people who spent their time cavorting around the world, but that their friendship didn’t stop him from being afraid that one day they might not come back.  Their friendship made the fear _worse_.

At the time he worried a fair amount that it might be a bit fucked up, but it’s not as if they brought some unfortunate sprog into the world just to alleviate their ter-life crises.  They thought about it; they talked about it with their actual families and their chosen family; they did more reading than he’d done throughout all three years of his degree.  Fifteen months later they were in some Manchester clinic at Christmastime, grinning in a way that was probably more than a little frightening, clasping each other's hands tightly as the doctor told them things looked viable.

Two days before his thirty-fourth birthday they had Ella.  She was tiny and red-faced and terrifying.  Nick still remembers how the room had contracted and how he’d felt as if there wasn’t any air in there as she lay cozily swathed in the hospital blanket.  And then she’d scrunched up her face and opened her mouth to scream, and it was as if her sharp little inhale allowed him to breathe, too.  He remembers his parents crowding in there, Aimee’s exhausted face and her raspy voice, hoarse from cursing him for three hours.

They were sorting out the flowers and balloons and the gigantic soft toy shaped like a bear that had arrived the day after Ella had been born, getting ready to take this fucking baby they had no idea what to do with but already loved desperately home.  There’d been some sort of commotion outside, the sound of running feet, and then five boys had tumbled into the room, a sour-faced nurse striding in after them.

“It’s okay,” Aimee had said, because Nick had been too busy gaping with the bear clutched in both hands.

“I thought you were on tour,” he’d finally said, stupidly, putting the bear down on the bed. 

Two major contract renegotiations and six years later One Direction hadn’t looked anything like the band they had been in 2013, but that didn’t mean they didn’t spend over half their time outside the UK thrilling teens by the thousands.  Nick had spoken with Harry on the phone right after Ella had been born, completely incoherent after two days of no sleep and incessant nausea from nerves.  Harry had apologised again and again for not being there and told him how proud and happy he was and hadn’t mentioned anything about coming.

“I told you ages ago we were timing the tour to end around the due date, mate, don’t be daft,” said Harry, moving into the room and hugging Nick. 

Nick’s arms hung limply by his sides as Harry squeezed him, until he remembered that yes, Harry had said that in the spring, had maybe even repeated it during their last phone conversation, and he lifted his hands to bunch Harry’s shirt up against the small of his back as he pressed him close.

“Hi,” Harry whispered into his neck.  “You’re a dad.”

Nick laughed a little wildly, feeling tears prick at the corners of his eyes for the twentieth time in three days.  “Guess so.  Mad, isn’t it.”

The other four were standing a little awkwardly, wedged against the door opposite the armchair on which Aimee was sitting, holding Ella.  (“If you think for one instant that I’m helping to pack anything, that I am lifting _one finger_ after pushing this one’s bloody football-sized head out of my vag, you fucking shithead, think again.”)  Over the years Nick had become much better friends with the four of them, inevitable when Harry’s and Nick’s friendship refused to die despite everything they supposedly didn’t have in common.  Nick had seen them be sick from too much tequila and cry from frustration when things weren’t working out with their label, and that mattered.  At this point he would even venture to say (in the privacy of his own home) that they were important to him, because they were important to Harry but also for their own sakes.  And yet Nick would hesitate to say he was really close to any of them—they looked happy to be there but also like they’d been dragged along with Harry and weren’t entirely certain what was expected of them, which was probably exactly the case.

“Want to hold her?” asked Aimee, her voice cutting into the weird tableau, and Harry squeezed Nick’s hand from where he’d moved around to clasp it as Louis started forward and then stopped himself, looking at Nick and Harry.

“Go ahead,” said Nick, inclining his head and smiling.  Harry nodded and smiled even wider than he already was as Louis took Ella from Aimee with gentle hands, cradling her carefully against his chest and using one finger to brush the downy hair back on her head.

“She’s tiny, fuck,” said Zayn, peering over her like a scientist, or maybe a very attractive but confused bird.

“Hullo, love.  Hello,” said Louis.  He shot another look at Nick, looking inexplicably vulnerable, and Nick made another ‘go on’ motion with his chin.  Louis looked back down at Ella.  “Hi, baby.  You’re beautiful.  Did you like your bear?  I helped pick it.  I’m your Uncle Louis.”

Harry snorted beside him, amused. Nick laughed a little too, mostly to hide the fact that in that moment he felt the fondest he’d ever felt of Louis Tomlinson.

“You’re a dad,” Harry whispered again.  His ridiculously green eyes were suspiciously shiny and fixed on Nick’s and there was still a huge grin splitting his face open.  Nick looked at his dimples instead of at him and squeezed his hand again and skittered his gaze away to Aimee, who rolled her eyes at him affectionately.

“Yeah,” Nick said.  “Yeah, I am.”

Harry squeezed his hand one last time, marching over to where Liam was now holding Ella, humming almost distractedly and looking at her with wide eyes.

“Alright, you tossers,” he said.  “Give my girl here already.”

He held out his arms as Nick looked down at the floor, trying and no doubt failing to hide his massive grin. 

The sight of Ella’s tiny head cradled in Harry’s hand, of the look in Harry’s eyes, is still one of the clearest things about that day.

 

 

 

Nick and Aimee lived together for the first six months.  They discovered everything they needed to together: just how exhausting a crying child could be, and how to wipe shit from your hands in a manner that complied with health and safety standards for preparing bottles for tiny beings.  They lost their tempers, with each other and sometimes with Ella, and then felt sick with guilt because you weren’t supposed to lose your temper with a baby, but it was so fucking hard to stay upbeat sometimes, partly because neither of them was the most patient person by nature.  A few times when Ella was asleep they left her in her crib with the baby monitor on and ran outside the flat, standing on the stoop and laughing hysterically until tears streamed down their cheeks that they could pretend were from happiness.

There were a lot of difficult things about those first frightening months of parenthood, but Nick would be lying if he said he didn’t mostly remember smiling.  Everything made him smile—everything.  Ella’s gurgling and her spit-ups and her little fat feet waving in the air and Harry’s absurdly awed face on his computer screen, nose pressed to the camera on his laptop as Ella rubbed sticky hands over Nick’s monitor, babbling.

Aimee moved out two weeks after Ella’s half-birthday, to a flat five streets away from Nick’s.  Nick had waved calmly from the pavement, but as he had watched Aimee drive away with the giant bear and half her shoes shoved in the boot and Ella in the car seat, he had wanted desperately to run after his little family, bear and all, screaming like a lunatic.

He had just barely suppressed the urge to knock on her window and tell her that maybe it was a bad idea; maybe they ought to wait two or three more months.  Just until winter was over.  But they had agreed from the very start that they wouldn’t become a tragic Madonna film.  That they’d raise Ella together but not entangle their lives more than they had to, because some really fraught shit probably awaited them down that road.  (“Just so we’re clear, you’re Madonna in this hypothetical scenario.”  “Yes,” agreed Nick.  “Wouldn’t dare argue otherwise, pet. Though at this point I feel I should clarify that I only watched parts of that film, and it was ironically.”)

So Nick had waved and smiled and cleaned his flat and gone to sleep and gotten up and gone to work every day that week, trying to behave like a normal person but failing, if Ian’s face was anything to go by. 

On Friday he had called in sick and then spent three days eating old Chinese and prawn crackers with his head half-under his coffee table.  He paused only for wine breaks and to bathe twice.  He spent four hours in the bath each time, watching cartoons on Netflix as his skin pruned and trying to stop listening for the ring of his mobile in the next room.  When it finally rang on Sunday he narrowly avoided braining himself on the sink as he ran out to get it, wet feet collecting lint and prawn cracker dust from the floor as he went.

“Hello, yes, hi—is everything all right over there?”

Harry’s amused voice answered him on the other end of the telephone.  Harry, who was somewhere in the Indian Ocean on some strange ten-date Asian tour he and the lads had agreed on with the label as a compromise between prime market access and nobody in One Direction ever getting to actually be at home.  His voice sounded as clear as if he were calling from down the street.

"Not sure there's anything right with the ‘roast beef’ they’re trying to serve us at this hotel, but otherwise things are ace.  You?”

Nick had been paralysed with the anger of it, with his rage at the sound of Harry’s stupid voice and at his stupider jokes about dinner—who ate a bloody _fucking_ Sunday roast in fucking Singapore, he wanted to know—and at the fact that it wasn’t whom he wanted it to be on the phone.  For a minute he hadn’t been able to say anything, breathing heavily down the phone like something from a slasher film and seething so completely that his fingers tingled.

“Nick?” Harry had asked, his voice immediately serious.

Nick hadn’t been able to answer.  He had actually considered blowing into the speaker and pretending their long-distance connection had fizzled and died, and only his knowledge that both he and Harry knew exactly what someone blowing into a speaker sounded like stopped him.  Harry didn’t say anything, but he seemed to know that the call hadn’t dropped despite the silence.  Nick heard him breathing on the other side of the line and moving around quietly.

Nick lay down on his dirty fucking floor, naked and with prawn cracker dust now stuck to his arse cheeks and his back.  He felt water dripping across his forehead and down his ears and neck and he hated his and Aimee’s idiotic fucking ‘adult’ fucking arrangement, fuck. 

He curled his fingers so tightly around his iPhone that he was afraid he might burst whatever made the screen light up.  He focused his eyes on Ella’s storybooks sitting on the shelf by the wall and tried to ignore the choking feeling in his throat.

He could hear the television go on on the other end of the line, someone murmuring softly to Harry and then Harry saying, “I’m good mate, thanks,” before a door closed.  Then the disgusting sound of Harry chewing, cutlery clinking in the background.

Nick doesn’t know how long he lay there (actually, he does; he remembers looking at the phone after they had rung off and thinking it was a good thing Harry was rich as sin and probably didn’t pay his own phone bills).  He had closed his eyes and waited for the crushing weight to lift from his chest and to feel slightly less as if he might explode like an overcooked breakfast tomato.

It took a long time for him to be ready to hang up.  Harry hadn’t said a single thing the entire time, but just as Nick was gathering his voice to say something, to joke or change the subject that hadn’t existed before or god knew what, Harry said, softly,

“What are you going to do when Aimee brings her back ’round tomorrow?”

Nick cleared his throat.  “We’re going to lunch after I finish work? At the place with the Bellinis.”

“What are you going to wear?” Harry asked immediately.

(Sometime in the weeks right after they’d had Ella they had taken her out to brunch and someone had snapped a picture of Nick standing by her pram, wearing jean shorts and looking distracted and like “a man who either employed the services of a full-time nanny or was a full-time nanny himself; there’s no scenario in which that could have been the outfit of a responsible parental figure, like,” as Louis had put it.  Nick, who had discovered that being around babies apparently made Louis 3000% more likeable, had laughed it off but then proceeded to have a partial existential crisis over whether Louis was right, and if so, what it might mean.

He had sat on his bed and stared into his massive wardrobe in silent panic and worried, considering what the right questions to ask Google in this situation even were, until Harry had framed the picture for him in some disgusting glittery thing he’d bought at Clinton Cards.  It said “BABY’S FIRST DAY OUT” in sparkly letters and had a wonky-eyed ceramic child in the corner.  It had come with a Post-It that said “You” with an arrow pointing to the word “BABY”.  Once he’d made sense of what the monstrosity actually was after taking it out of the bag Nick had thrown it vaguely in the direction of Harry’s head; one of the wonky eyes had chipped off the baby’s countenance when the awful thing had hit the floor and dented the hardwood.  After Harry left Nick had found it on top of the chest of drawers inside the walk-in wardrobe, where no one would see it but him, and he had felt inexplicably but immeasurably better.)

“A dad cardigan,” Nick said finally, voice still a little hoarse.  “No, a tweed jacket.  With a blue checked shirt.  I’m going to tuck it neatly into my trousers and wear a belt from Banana Republic and I’ll say I borrowed it from Louis when the paps ask me, because he said it really made the outfit pop.”

“Sensible,” said Harry.  “Top choices all around.  An outfit that says, ‘I pay the bills, and the bills don’t include the price of a full-time caretaker for my child.  A child I can keep track of, of course, because I’m not too busy drinking cosmos in like, my twatty ironic Chanel t-shirt’.”

Nick missed the days when Harry thought his twatty ironic Chanel t-shirts were the height of cool. Harry's voice sounded a little hazy, sleepy, and Nick realised it was past midnight where he was.  Nick was fairly sure he and the others had a show the next day.

“I’m going to get back into the bath now,” he said.

“Also sensible,” said Harry.  “You can be clean for Ella when she sicks up her lunch over you tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” Nick agreed, reminding himself.

“Tomorrow,” said Harry, that odd certainty that someone who was only twenty-five shouldn’t have access to in his voice.  “So stop freaking out and finish your bathtime wallowing and then go to bed early so it can be tomorrow sooner, right?”

“Yeah,” Nick said.  “Okay.” 

He had felt absurdly grateful but, as usual, hadn’t known what to do to make the feeling in his chest come out of his mouth without being sarcastic and probably devaluing it completely.  The silence had stretched a little, comfortable, until Harry had said, with the sound of a vaguely exasperated parent,

“Me too, arsehole.”

(“Good thing I know the exact sound the silence of ‘I love you’ makes after three years of knowing you, you twat, or we’d both be stuffed, wouldn’t we?”)

Nick had hummed an acknowledgment and muttered something about popstars getting their beauty sleep before hanging up.  Then he had picked up another bottle of wine from the kitchen and headed back to the bath.

The next day, when Aimee had shown up at the station with Ella in tow, there had been shadows under her eyes and she and Ella had both looked a little pale.  She and Nick had clutched at each other like they were keeping the other from floating away, joking about the fit waiters at the Bellini place and pretending nothing was wrong.  When Aimee had handed Ella over, Nick had kissed her little smiling face and said, not just to her but to Aimee and to Harry, whom he usually _couldn’t_ say it to, even though they knew,

“I love you, Ella-bug.  I missed you.  I love you so much.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At one point in this chapter Nick, Aimee, and Harry talk about childcare in ways that don't acknowledge their huge privilege, and Nick jokes that single parenthood is easy. He doesn't mean it, and neither do I.
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> Single parents are awesome and deserve all the respect in the world.

**2.**

The thing about nannies is that for all the joking Nick has done about them in the year and a half since they had Ella, he never thought they would actually need one.

They celebrate Ella’s second half-birthday with cake and a glass of wine for him and Aimee.  Once they’ve put her to bed Aimee turns to him and gives him the kind of serious look he has learned over his thirty-five years to associate with fucking disaster.

“You look like you’re being put on death row, Grimmy, jesus christ,” she says looking more than a bit taken aback.

He tries to school his face into something resembling calm and she laughs, a little bit of wine dribbling out of the side of her mouth.  She wipes it carelessly with the back of one hand and says,

“I know you have some traumatic associations with Ella’s half-birthday—”  He tries to protest, but she flaps her wine-stained hand to shut him up and keeps going.  “And I’m afraid I’m about to make it worse.  But—good god, you really have to stop looking at me like that.  I know you don’t think I’m about to screw you, baby daddy.”

Nick does know that, is the thing.  He is pretty much conditioned to brace for impact when someone makes the _we have to talk_ face, though.  With almost every single person he has ever come across this means Nick girds his loins to set down some boundaries and if necessary get the hell out of there.  With the very rare exceptions to that rule it means he feels dread fill his body from his toes to the tips of his still-fabulous head of hair and hopes someone is not about to emotionally cripple him (more, emotionally cripple him _more_ ) for life.  He makes a conscious effort to relax and says,

“Yeah, go on?”

“You know baby band?”

Baby band is their name for the three kids from New Jersey who play punk electronica and whom Aimee’s been managing for about a three years.  They were Ana’s discovery, really, but Aimes took them on almost as soon as she met them because their female drummer was clearly in charge and Aimee “had the hots for their overall spunk”.  Their signing with her had almost coincided with Nick and Aimee beginning to think about having Ella, so they became baby band because they were actual babies but also because they “are keeping me sane throughout a period of my life during which my feet resemble Macy’s Parade floats, Grimshaw, fuck you very much”.

They’re not really baby anything anymore: their last tour sold out decently sized venues in America and Nick is pretty sure they’re all over twenty now.  But they’ll always be baby band to him, if only because then he doesn’t have to refer to anyone else that he knows that way.

“What about baby band?”

“We have a good offer for them to tour in Asia and Australia,” she says, almost cautiously, and Nick, who sees some sort of problem is coming but is still really proud of how she’s made these kids so successful, grins wide and says,

“That’s brilliant, Aimes.  That’s brilliant!”

“I know,” she says, doing some sort of weird shrug/hair-flick combo that he might steal from her.  “They also have enough stuff written that they can start recording soon.”

Nick nods.  “What’re you going to start with?”

She looks Nick straight in the eye and then says, “Don’t interrupt me.”

It’s an instruction, not a chastisement.

“Weeeell, that depends on what you’re about to say,” Nick replies tauntingly, discreetly digging some of his nails into the sofa.

“I think it would be good for them to do both simultaneously.  They’re willing to split the recording process in two parts and don’t think that’ll mess with their groove, which means we can do a couple of tour dates in the middle.  They’re twenty; they can record on limited sleep.”

“They can do it and like it,” Nick agrees.  This doesn’t sound so bad.

 “What I actually want to say is that I got Warner to agree to get them studio time in Sydney, which is good because Chilly Gonzales is apparently out there raising alpacas or some shit and he’s going to produce most of the tracks.  They’ll start the tour in Japan next month and we’ll record in April and May with some dates in Australia and New Zealand in the middle.  Then they’re going to do a few South Asian dates.  I don’t have to be with them the whole time, obviously, Emilia’s going to manage the crap out of that tour like always, but I think it would be good for me to spend some time out there with them.”

“How much time?” Nick asks.  Aimee’s speaking in months and he doesn’t think that’s a good sign.

“This is really where they become the band they’re going to be and I want to be there to make sure nothing goes to shit as they’re on the way out of the oven.  We’ve all worked too hard to mess it up now, Nick, and you know it better than most people.”

“That I do.  How long, Aimee?”

“I want to go for two weeks next month and then three weeks in April and three in May.  _Don’t interrupt_.  I’m going to miss you and Ella like crazy but I think it’s a good opportunity for you to be the primary caretaker.  Not that you’ve been a secondary caretaker so far but it’s also good for us to get used to this as early as we can because we’re always going to have separate lives and the one kid between us.  Don’t make that face; I don’t mean _separate_.  And before you freak out I know you’ll both be absolutely fine.  But we’re in this together and Ella is the most important thing in my life so if you really don’t want me to go, I won’t.  Of course.”

Fatherhood has really fucked with Nick’s ability to open his mouth and respond to things in a timely fashion.  For someone who makes a living avoiding dead air it’s a fairly poor state of affairs, but he’s been giving himself a Get Out of Jail (Because You Have to Go Take Care of a Baby) card for the last year and a half.

“Right,” he begins, just to say something.

Aimee seems to know that barrelling on at this point would not be helpful, which is rare for her.  Nick’s mind is mostly stuck on a flashing red sign of JUST NO, but bizarrely there’s also a part of him that’s already thinking about how it’s going to work. 

The best thing about Aimee is that she lives her life the way she wants, she helps her bands to do the same, and she takes no prisoners while still managing to be caring and thoughtful and even nurturing to the people around her when she deems it’s appropriate.  Which is almost never.  She’s unstoppable, though, a force of nature, and Nick’s never going to be the person who gets in the way of that.

“We’re going to have to find a nanny,” he says.

He’d thought Aimee had been relaxed—she fakes it much better than he does; she does an excellent "I’m sad but I’m going to make you think I’m bored"—but the way her shoulders slump forward makes it clear that he’s just said the right thing.

“I don’t want to have someone else taking care of Ella every day,” he continues, “But we’ve only gotten away with the part-time help because I’m usually out by lunchtime and that still gives you half a day to work.  We’d probably already have had to do this if either of us had proper jobs.”

Aimee nods and says, “I don’t like having Ella alone with some stranger while new words are coming out of her mouth every day either, but it’s mostly going to be for a few hours in the morning.  Can you shift most of the other stuff to the weeks I’m here so you can be home by lunch most of the time?”

“Ian will help,” Nick says.  “We can give the interns more things to do; it’ll be a heartening learning experience for all. Maybe even a journey of growth and shagging between twinky intern and beard intern when the stress levels get high.”

Aimee rolls her eyes at the mention of Nick's favourite office soap opera, but he thinks he frankly deserves a pat on the back for how calmly he’s taking this.  Or possibly pretending to take it; he’s not entirely sure yet.

“We can probably call the same agency where we found Miriam and see who they can suggest for full-time caretaking,” Aimee says.

She’s looking at him with something of a side-eye.  She might be waiting for him to start rending his garments.  But here’s Nick, proving her wrong.  (Like a boss.)

“Not full-time.  Every day, but just until lunchtime.  I want to be with her the rest of the time,” he corrects.  “And yeah; they did a good job finding Miriam.”

Miriam is the part-time student who helps with Ella on Monday and Wednesday mornings and on days where they both have things to take care of.  Nick likes her well enough but the important thing is that he trusts her implicitly.  She never bats an eye when their more colourful friends traipse in and out of their flats and Nick liked her the first time she instinctively put herself between Ella and a camera on the street.  (Adorable Twitter documentation of his baby’s life is all well and good, but he has to be the one taking the pictures for it to be fun.)  He wishes Miriam could help them every day, but she likely won’t be able to with school.

Fundamentally, as with all things having to do with the few people he actually allows himself to care about, he doesn’t want the good arrangement they have going to change.  But he’s also not _such_ a twat that he can’t appreciate how lucky they are.  He’s only been back on mornings for about a year; for a while there they’d had him on Greg’s old slot due to the Beeb’s hundredth internal reorganisation and their obsession with Chris Evans’ numbers, which they were never going to beat.  If he were still there there’d be no way they could have gotten this far without more substantial help, not with his day consisting of normal-people working hours and Aimee’s own job.  He does what he loves and he gets paid well for it _and_ he’s gotten to see his little girl take her first steps and say “Dada” for the first time and learn how to put together the weird puzzle block toy that his mum got her without hitting herself in the face with the wood (much). And he gets to go back to doing that in three months’ time.  He and Ella just have to work a little harder right now to help her mum out.

 _I’m having an out-of-body experience_ , Nick thinks as this rational upstanding citizen/proper father figure internal monologue rattles onwards inside his head, independent of—well, of every facet of Nick’s horrid selfish personality.

Aimee is still looking at him like he’s being controlled by aliens, but Nick is suddenly buoyed by the thought that... he can probably do this.  There’s this odd little tickle in the back of his shoulders, a strange kind of “Buck up, boyo,” attitude taking residence in his clavicles.  It’s voiced courtesy of his grandfather but if he had to guess he’d say it dresses like Prince.

“We’ll be fine.  We’ll have someone come in the mornings and I’ll get back to her in the arvos, right?  And you’ll be back before we know it and we’ll both be mostly in one piece, probably.”

He tilts his voice up at the end as a call for reassurance.  He is decidedly not reassured by the cautious look on Aimee’s face.

“Sweetheart, I don’t think that’s going to work.”

If Aimee is about to take back her pep talk about being absolutely fine as a primary caretaker Nick is not above a gentlemanly slapfight.

“You leave the house at 5.25 in the morning every day.  My schedule is as fucked as yours is at this point, so I’m here for the hand-off most days if you had her the night before.  That means Miriam only has to do it once a month or so.  If you need someone to do it every day that’ll be tougher.  What if they’re late getting here?  Are you just going to take the Bug with you to the station?  Not to mention that you’ll literally have no breathing space if you’re working five to one and then taking care of a baby from one to nine.  I mean, people do that shit, Nick, but to put it bluntly I don’t think people who do that shit are our kind of people.  They’re, like, better types of people.  They hire someone to do their taxes but they could do them themselves if they really needed to.”

Nick doesn’t get it.

“What exactly are you saying, Aimes?  I could call my mum, I suppose, ask if she could come down here for part of it.”

“We could do that,” says Aimee.  “But… well, I think you need to hire a live-in, Nick.”

“A living what?”

“A live-in nanny.”

Nick pauses.

“Hire someone to _live in my flat_?  Like, all the time?  What if I need to have a wank? Or watch Love Actually and not pretend I’m not crying when she plays the Joni Mitchell record?”

His voice goes up worryingly at the end and Aimee shrugs. 

“Ella’s going to be here all the time.  The only way you’re going to get a wank anyway is with an ear on the baby monitor, and we all know that’s a boner-killer.”

Nick can’t argue against that.  He knows the cock-wilting power of the baby monitor well.  Sometimes it bothers him when it’s not even on and Ella’s with Aimee.

“It’s only for three months.  Yes, it’s a fucking pain; no, neither of us wants someone living in your house and in our child’s lives full-time, but you can always send them away and give them some time off when you don’t need them.  Which might be a lot; maybe you’re going to love taking care of Ella all the time.  But just in case it isn’t that easy, this way you just have someone to back you up.  You like Miriam enough that you wouldn’t kill her if she was here more often, right?  She won’t be able to do it, but we can make sure it’s someone you can bear.  You have a spare room.  It’ll be like having a subletter.  Who pays you rent in babysitting.”

“A lodger that I have to pay to live here and who then “pays the rent” in babysitting, you mean?  But I pay them first, that's what you're suggesting here?”

Aimee shrugs again.  “Sorry; that’s all I’ve got.  Handholding is not really in my nature, babe.  If you don’t want to do this, that’s fine—well, it’s not really fine, but I promise I would understand after sulking about it for three days—but if we decide we _are_ doing it then you need someone here.  Period.  You suck it up for three months and then I buy you copious drinks for a long time after that to make up for my absence and its impact on your fragile heart.  And when it’s your turn to go away I remind you of how much you nagged me when I did it, and I get to make fun of you for years after that.  With no complaining from you.”

 _It’s never going to be my turn to go away_ , Nick thinks but doesn’t say.  He appreciates it would make him sound neurotic and like someone his mum would call “an iffy prospect in not only insurance but also emotional terms”.  He can accept rationally that he’s going to have to leave Ella at some point, but he’s not willing to talk about it yet as if it’s going to be a reality.  He’s kind of in awe of Aimee, so certain of their home that she can leave it.

“Okay,” he says in the end, because there’s really not much else he _can_ say.  “We’re going to have to write this all down in one of those huge naff family calendars they sell in garden centres, because we’re pants at planning and I’m liable to leave you stranded at the airport or go to pick you up but leave Ella here when you’re coming and going.  I don’t want someone to put pictures on the internet when the police have to come unlock my own house for me with the baby still inside.  But I’ll call the agency tomorrow, which is at least a place to start.”

“Okay, but Nicholas,” Aimee says.  “This is wonderful, and I want you to know I really appreciate it.  But you have to really mean it; no leaving me eighteen voicemails while I’m on the flight to Japan.  I’ll come back if you do, but this is going to be really difficult for me too.  If I’m doing it, I can’t have you throwing a fit in a month’s time because you’ve decided you didn’t think it through properly.”

 _Me?_ Nick mimes, pointing at himself with a flourish and raising his eyebrows.  She raises her eyebrows back.

“I mean it, Aimes,” he promises.  “We’ll be fine.  I want you to do the things you need to so you can be a mum who loves her life and teaches our daughter that.’ 

The softness in her eyes intimidates him, so he keeps going.

“I want our child to be happy and pursue her dreams and grow up to sing over-produced songs about never saying never, or maybe to participate in some post-rock collective with a bit of soulful piano thrown in, yeah?  If you don’t fly free then we’re going to end up raising a folk rocker who plays the banjo and I’ll have to pretend I’m not her father when I go pick her up from secondary school.”

Aimee doesn’t give him the out.  She furrows her brow, which she never does because it wrinkles, and asks,

“Are you going to be okay?  I won’t even think about leaving if you’re not.”

“Please,” says Nick.  “I am a fabulous father.  Ask Ella.  Single parenthood is going to be an absolute doddle, and what’s more, we’re going to have tonnes of fun without you.  Which is not to say you won’t have to pay for your abandonment with champagne.  And sweets for the Bug.  More time with Ella for me, more free champagne and sweets for both of us.  And you can bring Ella something from everywhere you go.  All-around win, honestly.”

She must be able to tell that he means it, because Aimee smiles at him, the genuine wide wonky one that he loves, and says,

“Good.  Okay then. Let’s go to bed.”

“ _Ms_. Phillips.  The champagne first, surely.”

She ignores him.

“I’m sleeping in the guest room.  Mostly because I won’t be able to do it after as it’ll smell like moth balls and old people after the nanny lives there for three months.”

Nick stares after her as she walks away, more horrified by this than by anything else they’ve talked about. 

And distracted from the panic he can feel lurking in his stomach, which is what she probably meant to do.

 

 

 

“I’m going to cut someone.  No, I may progress straight to killing them.  I may literally end someone’s life.  I’ll be in the papers with a terrible picture where I’ll look like Alan Moore.  Nick Grimshaw, aka the Grimmy Ripper, murders caretaking agency employee with a rusty spade.”

Harry winces at him on the ‘Grimmy’ bit from where he and Ella are playing on the floor.  She’s propped up on his chest and pulling his curls, trying to reach a ball Harry’s put under his head.

“Zaa!  Zaa, my!”

She’s digging her little fingers into Harry’s nostril as she reaches under him, which actually looks as if it hurts quite a bit.  Harry giggles and does some strange thing with his hips that bounces her up and down on his stomach, and Nick looks away and prays quickly for guidance from a greater being.

“Are you even listening to me?  I’m going to—”

“Murder the nanny agency person with a garden rake, yes, I heard.  Ow!”

Harry’s head bangs on the floor as Ella pulls the ball out from under his hair with a fierce little yank of both her arms.

“Good girl!” he says, laughing.  “You’re so bright, Ella-bug.  You’re the smartest girl.”

Harry sits up and Ella moves around him like a climbing frame, scooting her bum down to the floor and bouncing her ball.

“Look Zaa.  Zaa look,” she says, not even bothering to look at Harry as she addresses him.  It’s almost as if she knows he’s going to be watching no matter what she does.

“She’s so cute,” Harry says for approximately the hundred thousand millionth time since Ella was born.  “I have to take a picture of this to send to Louis, oh my god, she’s so effing cute.”

“It would make me feel better if you and Tomlinson were less obsessed with my child.  Also if you would _listen to me about the witch at the nanny agency._   Stop texting Louis and listen to my pain!  Why does he need to see a picture, anyway, has he never seen a toddler bouncing a ball before?  My child is lovelier than any other child, yes, but she cannot possibly be the only child of his acquaintance who can bounce a ball.”

Harry hits send on the picture and looks up at him.  “No, but she’s the only child that belongs to us, you know?”

“No, I don’t know.  I’m fairly certain Louis was not in any way involved in the manufacture of my child.  Had he been it would have been straight back to the baby factory with her.”

Harry rolls his eyes at him.  “No, I mean like… we all have kids in our families, right?  And we know a lot of other people who have kids, too.  But the people who do jobs like us, most of them aren’t close enough to be family, and the kids in our families, they don’t belong to people whose lives are like ours.  So she’s the only child that really belongs to us, that makes you imagine what it might be like to have a proper family and do what we do.  She’s one of us.  She’s ours.”

Nick is still deciding what to make of this logic when Harry flips to lie down on his stomach and presses his face to Ella’s leg.

“Except you belong to me most of all, don’t you, Ella-bug.  Ella-bug and Hazza, together forever and ever.”

“Zaaaaa!!!” she agrees, throwing the ball at his head, and Harry butts at her belly with his nose.

Nick does everything to remember what he was doing before every cell in his body was taken up with love and wanting and as soon as he gets the thread of his last thought back, he says,

“I will concede that she belongs to you most of all if you listen to my Witch of Nannyland problems.  The kid has had enough attention, Harold, and it’s time to look at the second most interesting person in the room.”

“I don’t have a mirr—”

“Which is _me_.  Do you want me to murder someone, Harry?  Do you?  Do you want to have to pay my bail only to watch me be convicted anyway, and then Aimee will take to the bottle and you’ll have to quit your job and sell bongs in Camden Market to buy Ella shoes.  Is that what you want?”

“…well, I don’t want Aimee to become an alcoholic,” Harry says finally.

“Well, that’s a relief, Harold.  I suppose you wouldn’t spare a thought to what would be happening to me in prison, as long as _Aimee_ was painting crosses on her hands on the way into clubs at night.”

Nick can feel himself winding up to actually be upset about this, which is a thing that he does sometimes even though he is keenly aware just how mad it is, but thankfully Harry can see it happening too, and he curls his knees against his chest and then rocks himself into a standing position.  He ushers Nick back against the sofa and puts his legs over Nick’s knees and threads his fingers in the soft hair at the nape of Nick’s neck and says seriously,

“Nannygate ’20.  I’m ready.  Hit me with it.”

Nick heaves the greatest sigh possible and then says, “It’s hopeless.  Aimee leaves in a week and there is just no way I’m going to find someone before then, and the woman at the agency hates me, she hates me like the Crips hated Tupac, oh my god.  She _hates_ me.  She thinks I’m unreasonable and uncooperative and both are true, but not in this situation.  I _am_ trying, Harold.  I am.  There just isn’t anyone.  They absolutely do not have anyone who could possibly come and live in this flat without me killing them, which gets us back to our prisoner’s dilemma.  In which I am the prisoner.  In prison.”

Harry spares a moment to smile and thumbs-up at Ella as she calls to him from the rug, and then turns back to Nick.

“Okay.  Well, mate, I know this is a huge thing for you, having someone in your space, right, but it’s only three months.  I mean, worse comes to worst it’ll be like having a terrible housemate, I know you’ve had those before, like that guy after the MTV thing, who never stopped eating prawn cocktail crisps, right?”

“Peter. The worst person to ever live.”

“Worse than the woman from the agency who wants to drive-by shoot you?”

“Much,” says Nick.

“There you are.  So even if this person turns out to be terrible, at the very, very worst they’ll still be better than old Crispy Peter.  I mean, it really _is_ just like having a housemate, innit?  Except they won’t make a mess, in fact they’ll help clear up Ella’s messes, and you also basically have the permanent right to banish them from the flat, which you don’t with most other housemates.  Why are you even making such a big deal?”

Nick is tempted to just keep complaining about someone spraying cheap perfume in his flat and the smell sticking, but Harry’s earnest face nips that plan in the bud.  He looks down at Harry’s knobbly knees in his lap and mutters,

“I just don’t want someone making Ella’s house uncomfortable, all right?”

“Ella’s an eighteen-month-old baby, Nick; fairly sure she doesn’t even know this is her house.”

Nick sighs but presses on.  “No, I mean like… like my parents are lovely, right, really wonderful, and Jane and Andy too, but when you’re fourteen and don’t really know what to call yourself and you’re going to school in the North sometimes the space inside your room where you pretend to do radio into your hairbrush is all you’ve got, you know?”

Harry draws his bottom lip into his teeth and nods.

“And my parents and my siblings, they were such a huge part of letting me be who I wanted to be, but then doing what I do it’s like I get to be who I like but I don’t?  And I’m not whinging, not when I know this is so much worse for you I can’t even imagine, but Aimee and I go out and there’s the tabloids in our face, not always but sometimes, and here in this flat, this is where Ella and I do radio into a hairbrush, all right?  And she’s going to get older and go to nursery and then reception and we never get to have this time back, you know, just where she needs us all the time, and I don’t want to waste three months of it having to be careful.  Because even if the person is really nice, really the loveliest person you could hope for, we’d still have to be careful.  That’s just how it is.”

Nick lifts his hand to rub at his face but Harry catches it on the way up.  He scoots closer and nudges his head against Nick’s shoulder and holds onto his hand really tight with both of his.

Ella’s making the only sound in the room, babbling to herself, “Zaz play me play baa ball horse dada play play play yum yum yumyum,” as she tries to put the ball in her mouth.

Harry is actually physically unable to refrain from smiling at her when she does anything, so he lifts his head to do that and then curls back in.  So quietly Nick can barely hear him, he says,

“I actually kind of have an idea.  And I wanted to ask you this from the very beginning but it’s a little weird and I’m already over here all the time and honestly I don’t want you to feel like you can’t say no because you can.  Or if you think it’s weird I understand.  Because it’s weird.”

“Weirder than your Dark Backward nipples?”

“Bugger off.  I just.  I just think that maybe.”

“Spit it out, Haz.  Haven’t you learned by now that when you’re Harry Styles people usually give you what you ask for?”

Harry makes a frustrated sound in the back of his throat, and says, “But that’s the whole point!  I don’t want you to feel like you have to say yes because we’re mates or because you want to be nice.  I want you to say yes only if you want to.”

“Well, I can’t say yes or no if you don’t tell me what it is, you tosser!”

“I want to be Ella’s nanny!”

Harry gasps in a quick breath, as if he’s about to keep going, but then his entire body freezes and he looks up at Nick with deer-in-headlights eyes.

Nick pinches his nose with his free hand because he cannot possibly have heard right and repeats, “You want to be Ella’s nanny.”

“Look, Grimmy,” Harry begins.  It’s his reasonable voice.  “You don’t want someone else in the house, for what honestly I thought were probably daft idiotic reasons but it turns out they’re not, so that only means this makes more sense.  We just finished five months of tour on _Often Go Awry_ , so that’s us done until the summer, which matches up time-wise, and I’m really good with Ella, and I could take her to the park or to the zoo or wherever while you’re at the station, but not too often of course, because I know you don’t like people taking pictures.  Or we could stay here!  We don’t have to go out, we could just chill here.  Hazza and Ella-bug forever.”

He tilts his chin defiantly at Nick, his “I’m not a kid” jaw, and Nick throws up his hands and laughs.

“Harry, mate, you aren’t even making any sense.  I mean—”

“I know you probably don’t think I can take care of Ella all the time, but I can.  And anyway, it won’t be all the time, because you can keep Miriam on for Mondays and Wednesdays and you’ll be here too, and you already like Miriam which means you don’t have to even hire someone new, so you don’t have to talk to the cross woman from the agency again, and I’ve taken care of Ella for a full day and night before when you and Aimee have been away!”

“Listen to me,” Nick says urgently, because he can see the hurt in Harry’s eyes and this is important.  “I know you can take care of Ella.  Even if you didn’t exactly know how to do it I’d trust you with her, because I know you love her more than anything and you wouldn’t let anything happen to her, not ever.  But you do know how to do it: you know the perfect temperature to make her bottle before bed and how to put the plush giraffe on the bed just so, she’s always unhappy when we try to do it.  You are wonderful with her in a way I never thought someone who wasn’t related to her could be.”

“I may not be related to her, but she’s still my family,” says Harry. “She’s still mine.”

It’s so profoundly shattering to hear him say it with that quiet certainty that Nick actually doesn’t know what to do with himself.  He pulls Harry close and takes a deep yoga breath all the way into his stomach and doesn’t reply straight away.

“She loves you,” he says.

“I love her, Nick, and I want to help you take care of her while Aimee’s gone.  Please let me help.”

Nick doesn’t want to say no to him—he never, ever wants to say no to him—but he has to.

“Haz, you just said it yourself.  You’ve just come back from five months of touring.  You’re doing a North American summer tour in July.  This is the only time you have in between, and you can’t spend it taking care of a baby.  You’re young, popstar, but you’re not that young.  Nobody is that young.”

Harry blows a gust of air out through duck lips, as if Nick is saying something completely unreasonable instead of attempting to be the only sensible person in the room.

“Grimmy, I’ve been back for three weeks.  Yes, I spent three days sleeping it off, and then I watched all of Masterchef: The Professionals in one weekend.  Then I came over here and hung out with Ella.  And then I woke up the next day and came over here and hung out with you and Ella and Aimee.  And then I—”

“Okay, I get it,” says Nick.

“So stop being a git then!  This is where I want to be, which you know because this is where I always am.  Louis has to rest his knees these days because twenty-eight is apparently hard, but honestly mostly we take breaks so we can chill out and do things we love.  And this is what I l—”

“I get it!” Nick shouts, because he can’t stand to hear Harry say it one more time.  It’s only a small shout, but Ella looks up in surprise and her eyes dart between Nick and Harry, which is a good sign she’s deciding whether to burst into tears or not.

Harry rushes to pick her up and he spins her around a little to distract her, saying, “Come on now, Ella-bug.”

He blows a raspberry into her cheek; she shrieks as if she’s at Disneyland.  Harry angles her so that they’re both looking at Nick, and he opens his eyes wide and says,

“Give me—give _us_ ,” and here he bounces Ella for emphasis, “One non-bull… one non-ninny reason why this isn’t the best solution you’ve ever heard.”

 _I’m in love with you_ , Nick thinks.  _And if you come live in this house and blow raspberries into my daughter’s cheek for three months when I have to watch you walk out the door it’s going to fuck me up permanently.  That’s a reason_.

“I guess if you’re that desperate for a second job we can take you on despite your criminal history,” is what he says out loud.

Harry beams and does a little shimmy with Ella.  “That’s right.  That’s right!  Nobody can resist us, Bug.  Team Hella for-e-ver.”

“I reserve the right to revoke my agreement if you call my daughter that again,” Nick says.

“We reserve the right to ignore you, you wan… you wonky-faced twit.”

He starts making up some sort of nonsense song on the fly, dancing Ella around the room. 

“Hella hella hella, hella trouble, hella best, Team Hella forever, hella Bella Ella and Haaaaaz,” he sings, making funny faces for her.  Ella laughs and pokes him in the dimple with one little hand.

“Ella,” she says.  “Ella.”

Nick knows it’s coming, but he still shoots Harry a murderous stare when she joins in.

“Hella ella hella teemella hella!”

“I hate you,” Nick says.

“Better get over that before I move in and become your nanny,” says Harry.  “Boss.”

 

 

 

They take Aimee to the airport together, but Harry wanders off to hide his face in the corner of the WH Smith’s to give the three of them some privacy.

Aimee hugs Ella tight, rubbing their cheeks together and smearing her tears all over both of their faces.  She and Nick have already said goodbye properly.  They’ve explained it to Ella even if she doesn’t understand and they’ve spent the last three days together, huddled in the flat with the curtains drawn watching _Finding Dory_ on repeat.

Aimee finally hands Ella back to Nick, turning her face away purposefully and rifling through her bag for her passport.

“You two take care of each other,” she says to them, brushing a kiss across Nick’s forehead.  “And you, Grimshaw, don’t get your heart broken too badly thanks to your terrible ideas.”

Nick gives her a long, unimpressed look.  He wishes he had a good comeback, he wishes he could deny it or laugh it off, even, but he doesn’t and he can’t, so they just continue to stare at each other until Aimee’s mouth twitches and she starts to laugh.  It’s not a happy sound, but it’s a fond one, and it makes Nick feel not alone. 

As soon as Aimee chuckles Ella starts going, too, though, and hearing her high-pitched tiny giggles means that Nick only lasts about five seconds before he’s snickering too.  Before they know it the three of them are laughing as loudly as they can in the middle of Heathrow, probably looking like a danger to society.  Out of the corner of his eye Nick can see some people taking the long way around them.

Nick and Aimee laugh so hard they cry, which means they can get up to their old tricks and pretend they’re happy tears. It’s familiar, the two of them and Ella against the world. When Nick and Ella lose sight of Aimee through the security barrier and turn back toward the car park, though, Harry is right there to take them home. Ella extends her arms and Nick hands her off to Harry, surprised by how familiar that feels too.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aimee is apparently five years old and plays pranks? IDK. I think once you give yourself licence to be ridiculous it all just goes downhill from there.

**3.**

The drive home is quiet.  Harry is hunched over the wheel and squinting a little, like he forgets he’s tall enough to sit back into the seat.  It’s endearing; Nick divides his time between looking at him and checking on Ella in the rearview mirror, gazing gormlessly at the M4 when he needs a break to stop himself from freaking out.

Ella picks up on the mood and plays quietly in the backseat, talking to herself, but as they get closer to the flat she perks up and starts to speak.                                                                                                                                             

“Zaa!” she calls, a little muffled from the fingers in her mouth.

“Yes, love?” asks Harry, craning his neck around the seat to look at her quickly.

“Want beans, Zaa.”

“For tea, darling?”

“Yes yes yes great,” she says, waving her wet fingers at him.

Harry beams at her and waves back, and says, “Whatever you want, Ells.”

When they get back to the flat Harry motions Nick and Ella to go ahead while he gets his bags from the boot.  He’d been supposed to bring his things by earlier, but hadn’t wanted to interrupt Aimee and Nick and Ella’s time before Aimee left.

Nick busies himself putting Ella down on the floor in the sitting room and making sure she has her toys.  He goes into the kitchen and gazes despondently into his fridge.  He’s sure he has something, but he has absolutely no desire to cook.  He shakes himself a little as he looks, trying to dispel the strange feeling of apprehension that has wormed its way into his midsection, and calls to Harry,

“We’re ordering takeaway; cooking is for the weak.”

Harry shuffles back into the kitchen with an odd look on his face and says,

“Your spare bedroom smells funny.”

“Don’t you start,” says Nick, wagging a finger at him.  “I’ve had all the spoonful of sugar jokes I can take in the last few days.  A man has limits.”

“No, I mean it,” says Harry, shoving past Nick to look into the fridge.  “Sort of musty and strange.”

Nick shrugs.  “Probably just needs airing out; open a window or something.”

“In February?” asks Harry, incredulous.

Nick shrugs again.  “We can set the heating to go an extra hour tonight.  Honestly, princess, up to you.  If the smell isn’t up to the standards to which you have become accustomed you can do something about it or you can stop complaining; you don’t get to do both.”

It’s a little sharper than he intends, and he winces a little internally, not sure what to say as a follow-up.

“I wasn’t complaining,” Harry says, finally, a little mulish.  “Anyway.  We can order food but we should make something for Ella.  I’ll puree some carrots or summat to go with bits of whatever we order.”

“Okay, Nigella,” says Nick, rolling his eyes a little.  “You know where the spice rack is.”

Harry’s smile doesn’t come as easily as Nick is used to, and he finally says, quietly, “I just don’t think we ought to feed the Bug pizza or something on the first night I’m here.  I feel guilty.”

Something inside Nick shrivels up and dies and he smiles, going for apologetic but probably hitting something closer to awkward.

“Order Thai, whatever you want.  I’m going to take a shower.  Get something mild and boring and rubbish with chicken in it for me and we’ll give her bits of that and your special pureed carrots, or whatever.”

“Don’t forget the beans,” says Harry, already rummaging in the cupboards for a tin.

“Of course not,” says Nick, grinning and heading towards his room.  “Not the beans.”

 

When he comes out of the shower wearing an old t-shirt and some tracksuit bottoms Ella and Harry are watching television.  Well, Harry’s watching a re-broadcast of that afternoon’s _Coronation Street_ and Ella is sitting on his lap, doing something to his curls that appears to involve her mouth and the threadbare cloth doll Pix brought her from somewhere in the Caribbean.

“Carrots and beans are on the cooker,” says Harry, absently, utterly entranced.

“The glamorous life of international star Harry Styles,” says Nick in his best broadcasting voice. 

Harry turns his head towards him and smiles, something sweet that crinkles his eyes, and says, “This is the best.”

Nick rolls his eyes and smiles to avoid doing anything else and goes into the kitchen, where some neatly peeled and chopped carrots are sitting in a pot of boiling water with the beans waiting in another pot beside them.  Nick turns the hob on under the beans—he spent ages in the shower, and the Thai place is just around the corner—and a few minutes later the doorbell rings, just as the beans are starting to boil.

“Hi, Mong,” says Nick, with the bashful smile of anyone who is on first-name terms with their delivery people.  He’s been better since Ella came along, of course, but he can’t go out as often, and ultimately most of the things he’s learned to cook over the years he chose to impress people and not because they were convenient.  He only knows how to cook five or six simple things, and he gets bored easily.

“Hi Grimmy,” Mong says, and heads off with a jaunty flick of his hand.  Of course Harry’s paid already.

“Tea’s here,” he calls, and Harry comes into the kitchen with Ella on his hip, bustling her into her high chair and then upending the pot with the carrots into a colander.  He drops the carrots into the blender with a dash of milk and gets it going, getting Ella’s tray and spooning beans into one of the hollows, then the pureed carrots into another once they’re done blending.  He opens the bag with the takeaway in it and carefully picks out four pieces of chicken from Nick’s pad thai with the chopsticks, placing them in the final well in the tray and then putting the whole thing in front of Ella.  He gets her bib from the drawer and ties it around her neck, handing her a spoon in the same movement.

“Here you go, Bug,” he says, as Nick gapes, a little taken aback by the efficiency of it.  “Be careful; it’s hot, okay?”

“Hot hot,” says Ella, and Harry bends down to blow into her beans and carrots, moving the spoon through them quickly to cool them down.  The toddler-sized spoon looks ridiculous clasped in his long fingers.  When he’s satisfied he puts his pinky finger into the corner of the carrots to test the temperature, then the beans, and finally hands Ella her spoon back.

“Go ahead Ella-bug,” he says, and she smiles lopsidedly at him.

“What do we say, Ella?” says Nick, on auto-pilot.

“Thanks Zaa thanks,” she says, already smearing carrots all over her face.  She’s had a thing for repeating words for the last couple of months.

Harry heads back to the centre island to get the takeaway cartons, putting them down on the table with some cutlery.  He wets some kitchen roll and places it next to Ella, ready to wipe her face when she needs.  Nick can’t stop staring.

“What?” Harry asks.

Nick shakes his head, watching mutely.

“Told you I could take care of you,” Harry says, dumping half his curry onto his rice and waggling his eyebrows at Nick a little smugly.

“Yeah,” says Nick, absently.  He picks up his fork and eats his pad thai and shuts up.

 

Harry does the washing up while Nick retreats into the sitting room with Ella, not sure what to make of the evening so far or of Harry’s weird impression of Rosie the robot from _The Jetsons_.

“Daddy, daddy,” says Ella, conversationally, and Nick says,

“Yeah, Bug?”

“I want play,” she says, waving her doll at him, and he says,

“All right, but only for a few minutes, Bug.  Bedtime soon,” he says.

Her face creases dangerously and Nick slides down the sofa onto the floor, ready to distract her.  Then Harry comes into the room and Ella forgets about him entirely.

“Zaa, play?”

Harry glances worriedly at Nick, and says, “I think it’s bedtime soon, Ella-Bug.”

Nick gapes.  Harry has never, not once in the entire time since Ella was born, said no to anything Ella has asked him to do.  At best he’ll throw Aimee and Nick an insincere apologetic look as he helps Ella get up to whatever mischief she wants.

Ella’s face is a cartoonish picture of toddler indignation.  Nick would honestly not be surprised to hear a low, evil mastermind voice come out of his daughter right now, demanding, silkily, “ _What_ did you say, Harry Styles?”

Nick’s fantasies about his daughter’s future as a supervillain aside, she’s still only a year and a half old, and her face crumples almost immediately.  A second later she’s crying, a single, shrill note as she holds her doll down by her side.

“Hey, Ella, enough,” says Nick, warningly.  It’s been a stressful day for all of them, but he’s not about to let her throw a tantrum over bedtime.

At the sound of his voice Ella just cries harder, turning her face away.  Nick sighs, heaving himself upright and going to pick her up.

Her cries taper off, somewhat, and she turns her head into his shoulder, sobbing quietly.

“It’s all right, darling,” he says.  “It’s been a long day, yeah, Bug?  Why don’t we get you ready for bed?  We can read a story before sleep.”

She nods sadly into Nick’s neck, and he looks up at Harry and says, “Let’s just give her her bath early and put her down.  She’ll wake up horribly early tomorrow, but I think she’s done for the day.”

Harry nods, looking shocky.  It’s not that Ella has never cried or thrown a tantrum in front of him, but this may be the first time he’s been part of the reason _why_ she’s crying.  Nick remembers coming home the one time they’d left her overnight with Harry, and she’d been too busy laughing to do much else except call Harry’s name delightedly as Nick walked her down the path to the car.

Nick gets her clean as quickly as he can.  She cries quietly the entire time, complaining about the water and the soap in her eyes and asking for a rubber duck that disintegrated two months ago.

Nick shakes his head and dries her with her favourite fluffy towel.  Harry is a tense line of limbs beside him, his muscles locked up in misery.  Nick babbles at Ella senselessly, trying his hardest to ignore her tired weeping, and Harry hands him talcum powder and moisturizer and baby oil silently, looking at Ella with wide eyes.

They head into Ella’s bedroom and Nick places her gently on her bed, reaching for a book.  She looks up at him with wet eyes and says, “Mummy, Daddy.  Mummy.”

Nick freezes.  It’s not as if she’s not used to being without Aimee, but on the rare occasions when she’s upset before bed and she wants her mother Nick calls her up on his mobile and they Facetime until Ella falls asleep.

“She’s not here, Bug,” says Harry, into the silence.  Ella turns betrayed eyes towards him and cries harder.

“Not nice,” she says.  “Want mummy!  Not Zaa, not nice.”  She turns her face away and keeps crying, curling her little fists up near her mouth.

The look on Harry’s face is indescribable.  He looks as if someone’s just accused him of murdering pensioners or tiny bunnies.  Under that is a tangible layer of hurt that turns Nick’s insides.

“Hey, hey,” he says, as much as Harry as to Ella.  “It’s all right, darling.  It’s all right, darling, let’s just go to sleep.”

He doesn’t open the book; he just murmurs senselessly to her, stroking her dark curls back from her face.  Eventually her eyes start drooping.  Her sobs taper off into quiet breathing, and she falls asleep.

Nick blows some air out loudly through pursed lips in gratitude, then turns the baby monitor on.  She’s technically too old for it, but the walls are incredibly thick in the flat, and he learned the hard way that for a DJ his ears are remarkably shit.

“Come on,” he says to Harry.  “Let’s have some wine.”

Harry follows him out of Ella’s nursery silently, his shoulders and head drooping as if he’s waiting to go to the headmaster’s office.

Nick pours them both a parents’ glass of white wine—all the way to the top, shamelessly—and heads back to the sitting room, patting the sofa next to him.  Harry curls up against him immediately, nuzzling against Nick’s neck for a minute before reaching for his glass of wine and drinking half of it at a speed that’s probably faster than advisable.

“That was awful,” he says, finally, his eyes and mouth drooping at the corners.

“Hey,” Nick says, soothingly, too tired to make his voice sound upbeat.  “It happens.”

“It _happens_?” Harry asks, indignantly, as if Nick has personally offended him.

Nick shrugs.  “It happens, Harold.  She’s a toddler.  She gets tired, she gets upset, she gets stubborn.  She once threw mash and gravy at me and refused to let me come near her for a whole day.  Whenever I tried she shouted ‘No no no no no’ as loudly as she could.  The neighbours even came ’round to make sure she was okay after Aimee tried to take her outside to calm down and they heard her from the window.”

“Really?” asks Harry.  There’s something hopeful in his voice, and Nick smiles ruefully.

“Really.  Welcome to parenthood.”

Harry frowns at his mocking tone, but then seems to register what Nick has just said and beams at him.  Then his face falls again.  The quick progression of expressions on his face is a little worrying.

“I was supposed to be helping the two of you,” he says, finally.  His face is still pinched.  “You know, making it easier.”

Nick laughs.  The one he wishes he would learn how not to let out, uneven and too loud and a little pitchy.  Harry looks at him curiously.

“You’re helping, Haz.  I’m pretty sure I would have driven us into a hedgerow off the motorway if you hadn’t been here.  A few tears at bathtime I can handle.  You’re helping.”

( _Why?_ he doesn’t say.  _Surely you have other things to do?_ )

Harry drinks more of his wine, at a reasonable rate this time, and smiles into his glass.  He curls into Nick’s side again and Nick ruffles his curls, allows himself to press his lips against Harry’s forehead for a tic.

They chat for a little while about silly things.  Harry tells him some stories from the last tour that he hasn’t heard yet, and then they sit in comfortable silence for a few minutes before Nick says, “I think I’m going to bed.  I know; it’s 9pm and I’m pathetic.  But it’s been a very long day and I have work tomorrow.”

Harry hums next to him, seemingly in agreement.  He stretches and takes both of their glasses to the kitchen, and Nick drops his head onto the back of the sofa and looks at the ceiling, breathing in and out slowly through his nose and trying not to fall asleep right there.  When Harry comes back out into the sitting room Nick stands up and heads down the corridor to the bedrooms.

“Good night, popstar,” he says, quietly, gripping Harry’s thin wrist between his fingers briefly.  Harry looks at him and Nick says, quickly and probably more than a little mumbly, “Glad you’re here.”

Harry smiles at him, soft, and keeps walking to the spare room.  He doesn’t acknowledge Nick’s sentimentality and Nick loves him for it fiercely.

Nick brushes his teeth, makes sure the baby monitor is plugged in and on, shucks off the bottoms and crawls into his bed in his t-shirt and boxer briefs.  He stares at the dark outlines of the frames on his wall in the dim light of the streetlamp outside and keeps breathing slowly, sending a quick, _Good luck, love_ to Aimee in his mind.

He’s just about to drift off, covers bunched up in an awkward grip against his chin, when his door creaks open.  He sits up with a start, asking, nonsensically, “Ella-bug?”

Harry laughs softly.  “Yes, it’s me.  I’ve climbed out the crib and used all my soft toys in a pile to reach your doorknob.”

“Don’t _be_ a knob,” Nick replies, falling back onto his bed.  He pulls the duvet up to his chin again and asks, “What is it?”

Harry shuffles further into the room, dressed in nothing but boxer briefs.  It’s not an unusual occurrence, Harry coming into his bedroom practically naked, but Nick tenses and repeats,

“Harry, what is it?”

Harry sighs.  “It really does smell funny in the spare room.  I pulled back the duvet and I think Aimee put something in the bed.”

“Aimee put something in the bed?” Nick asks, a little incredulously.

“I don’t know, it’s a bag of some weird white tablet thing.  It smells like sleeping with my gram, Nick.”

Nick takes back his good luck to Aimee and curses her instead.

“She put a bag of mothballs in the bed?”

He can see the outline of Harry shrugging against the light coming in from the corridor.  “I don’t know what it is.  It smells fucking awful and I am not sleeping in there and I hate your sofa.  Budge over.”

Nick resigns himself to a night of ridiculousness, rolling onto one side of the bed and lifting the duvet.  He can see Harry’s outline actually fistpump before the door closes and the room goes dark again.  Nick can hear Harry shuffling around the room, navigating around the bedposts and then wriggling his way onto the bed.  He shoves up right against Nick and puts a hand on Nick’s hip.

“Good night, Grimmy,” he says.

“Good night, Harold,” Nick says, and pretends to himself that he’s not curling back into Harry’s warmth.

 

 

When Nick’s alarm goes off the next morning he wants to die.  There are days when a good night of sleep makes him feel refreshed and ready to tackle the day and the upcoming show.  Then there are days when it’s just fucking five in the morning, and no amount of sleep the night before can make that better.

Nick hauls himself into the shower, noting absently that Harry’s up as well.  He turns the water as hot as he can bear and stands under it, sleep-stupid, until his arms begin feeling functional and he can get around to washing his hair.

When Nick comes out into the kitchen Harry is at the island, making coffee.  He pushes a mug towards Nick and Nick glares at him suspiciously.

“Why are you awake?” he asks.  “Miriam will be here soon; you can go back to bed.”

“I’m already up,” Harry says, shrugging.  “Ella will probably wake up soon, right?  We put her to bed really early yesterday.”

“We usually check in on her before I go just to make sure,” Nick says.  He takes another huge gulp of his coffee.  “But she probably won’t wake up before 7, maybe 6.30 because of yesterday, and she’ll probably play for a little while on her own before calling for you.  What are you doing, Harry, honestly.  Last time I saw you up this early I think someone had set off a fire alarm.”

“I was just ready to wake up, I guess,” Harry says, drinking his own coffee.  Nick continues to look at him distrustfully, but has to stop and move slowly towards the door when he hears a quiet knock.

“Hi, Miriam,” he says, with the voice of the undead.  She laughs.

“Heya, Grimmy.”

She walks purposefully past him into the kitchen while Nick shuffles to close the door.  When he makes his way back to the kitchen she and Harry are chatting on the breakfast stools.

“I need to go deal with this,” he says, pointing despondently at his own face.  He doesn’t wait for a response before heading back towards his bedroom.

He’s perfected the quiff-and-undereye-concealer-in-three-minutes routine to a point where it’s possible to do it half-asleep.  He shrugs on his coat and gets his wallet and mobile and pads quietly to Ella’s room.  She’s still asleep, and he leans down to press a soft kiss to the crown of her head.

“I’m off,” he says, popping his head into the kitchen doorway.  “Ella’s still asleep.”

Miriam nods, cutting her eyes to the open v of his coat.  “It’s freezing outside, Grimmy.”

Nick hears her, but is still too sleep-addled to know what the appropriate motor response to her words is.  Harry stands up, handing Nick his coffee mug on the way past.  Nick drinks it—Harry’s managed to create a milky lake of sugar in the bottom two inches of the mug, but Nick isn’t nearly as disgusted as he should be—and starts when Harry appears behind him, placing a hand on his shoulder and turning Nick around to face him.

He takes the mug from Nick’s hands and puts it down.  He has a wide soft grey scarf in his hands, and he winds it twice around Nick’s neck before leading him to the door by the crook of his arm.

“It’s a taxi day today, mmh love?  No driving.”

Nick nods.  “Okay,” he says.

Harry pecks him on the cheek and pushes him out the door, calling out, “Have a good show.  We’ll listen!” as Nick walks stupidly towards the street.

By the time Nick makes it into the station he is feeling like a human being again.  There’s a tickle in the back of his throat, though, and he hopes idly that he’s not going to get ill.  He suspects exhaustion is the more likely cause; there’s something about emotionally trying days that just takes everything out of him.  When he’d broken up with Matt he’d actually thought he’d had mono for about two weeks, until Aimee and Pix had dragged him to the doctor and shot that theory dead in one of their trademark acts of brutal-honesty kindness.

“Moooorning, Grimmy,” says Ian, handing him another coffee as Nick shuffles into his chair.

“God bless you, Chaloner,” says Nick.  “Good morning, Fiona, intern with the beard.”

Ian has been Nick’s head producer for about a year now.  Finchy has some very important job now that involves haranguing all the producers for Radio 1 and some of the Radio 2 ones.  Nick is torn between feeling abandoned and feeling proud, but on most days proud wins out because he’s not actually that bad of an apple.

“My name is Jonathan,” says intern with the beard, possibly for the twentieth time.

“I know, darling,” says Nick, grinning winningly at him.

“You’re referring to me as ‘intern with the beard’ in your head right now, aren’t you?” asks intern with the beard.

“Yes,” says Nick.  “I am.”

They start the morning with something from _Often Go Awry_ , because why not, Nick thinks.  It’s his party and he’ll play One Direction if he wants to.  He’s possibly at the stage of the party where the guests are leaving because he’s been playing One Direction non-stop for the last six hours (years), but oh well.  Can’t please everyone, can you.

“Those were the lovely boys from One Direction with their second single from their new album, _Often Go Awry_ ,” he says.  “Hope you lot got a chance to see them earlier this year when they were wrapping up their European tour in the UK.  Good way to start the morning, even if it’s too early by half.  Let’s have a little Drake now—I love this record.”

The music fades in and Fiona swivels in her chair to look at Nick.

“Are we going to have to listen to even more One Direction now that you’ve shacked up with wonderboy?” she asks.

“We haven’t ‘shacked up’, Fiona,” says Nick, only a little bit acidly, thinking of Harry wrapping the scarf around his neck earlier, the memory coming back to him with an odd sleepy sepia filter.  “He’s helping with Ella while Aimee’s off touring the world with her children.  Don’t impose your fantasies on my life, please.”

Fiona laughs, utterly unbothered, and says, “So yes to even more One Direction, then?”

“I don’t think that’s possible without changing the name of the show,” says intern with a beard, dryly.

“You know, intern with a beard, we’re not required to have you in the booth.  Feel free to go get us all coffee and send other intern in instead,” says Nick.  “I’m sure he’d be grateful for this learning opportunity.”

Bearded intern holds up his hands defensively, slumping back onto the bench.

Nick tries to look professional and aloof.  He guesses his case isn’t helped by his phone lighting up about forty minutes later, with a picture of Harry and Ella smiling into the camera.

 _Shes not cross w me anymore!!!!!_ says the accompanying message.

 _I’m working, Harold_ , Nick sends back.

 _So r we!!!_ he gets a few seconds later, with a picture of Ella piling blocks against the wall in a careful tower, Harry’s hand holding the whole structure up at the base.

Nick smiles down at his phone.  He can hear Fiona and Ian snickering over the sound of Rihanna, but honestly, fuck them.  They wish they had an adorable child at home.

 

They run through the shows for the week as soon as they’re off the air.  Nick wants to take advantage of the fact that Miriam is at home to get as much work done as possible.  By the time he gets a taxi home he’s fairly sure he’s not imagining the tightness in his throat or the headache creeping slowly outward from his temples.  _Ugh_ , he thinks.  _Great._

Harry and Ella are watching _Monsters Inc_. when Nick gets home.  He hangs his coat up and gets a cup of tea from the kitchen and sits down to join them.  Nick remembers a time when he never watched films, but it’s amazing what having a child will do for your cinematographic appreciation.  Around the time that Ella was born films went from painful two-hour torturefests of boredom in uncomfortable cinema seats to the only thing keeping him from pulling his hair out as he sat at home, listening to Ella’s soft breaths coming from the next room, having exhausted the entire list of people he could text to ask _What r u up to?_ without risking someone misunderstanding the text as an invitation to come ’round for a shag.

“Hi Daddy,” says Ella from the floor.

“Hi Ella-bug,” says Nick, slumping against the back of the sofa.

“All right?” Harry asks from where he’s sitting on the floor.

“Think I might be getting a cold,” says Nick, taking another sip of his tea.

Harry’s eyebrows draw together.  “That’s rubbish.  Want to nap for a little while?  I’ll wake you up in a little bit.”

Nick looks down at Ella.  He wants to spend more time with her, but he also doesn’t want her to catch whatever he’s got.

“Okay,” he says finally.  “Thanks, duck.”

“Of course,” Harry says, smiling.  “I’ll come get you soon.”

Nick wakes up on his own about an hour and a half later.  He finds Harry and Ella in Ella’s room, looking over one of the huge picture books Aimee and Nick got Ella, with the stiff cardboard pages she has to use both hands to flip.

“What’s this?” Harry is asking, pointing at a picture of a pineapple.

“Grape,” says Ella.

Harry laughs.  “No, Ella-bug.  It’s a pineapple.”

“Grape.”

“Pine-a-pple,” Harry enunciates carefully.

“Grape,” says Ella, batting at Harry’s hand where it’s preventing her from turning the page.

“We’ve decided that the other fruits will come in their own time,” says Nick, and Harry starts.  “Everything is grape right now.  We think maybe she thinks it means fruit.”

“How are you feeling?” asks Harry.

Nick makes a so-so gesture with his hand.  He’s a bit of a sorry bastard when he’s ill.  He wants someone to bring him tea and soup and tuck the duvet in around him.  He’s a marginally less poor patient when Ella’s around, but not by much.

“Hi, baby girl,” he says, fitting himself behind her, careful not to bring their faces too close together.  It’s not as if they’re going to avoid a flat full of ill people if he’s really contagious, but he can try.

“Daddy daddy,” she says.  “Look, grape.”

Nick looks at the picture she’s pointing to and says, “Banana, yes.”

“Grape,” Ella says.  _And that’s final_ , her tone implies.  Harry laughs.

 

Nick passes out as soon as they’ve put Ella to bed.  He tries to convince Harry to also go to bed early—he knows first-hand just how exhausting your first days of full-time childcare can be—but Harry insists he’s fine because he’s not eighty and stays up, texting Louis on his phone.  Nick faceplants onto his pillow and has no idea what happens between that point and the next morning, when he wakes up to the sound of his alarm and finds Harry in the kitchen again, cup of coffee in his hand.

  
By the time Thursday rolls around Nick is convinced a stranger is inhabiting Harry’s body.  He’s been up before Nick every morning, and yesterday when Nick came back from the station Miriam reported she’d had absolutely nothing to do all morning, as Harry and Ella had been playing non-stop and he’d fed her and cleaned up after them.  At some point Harry had also found time to buy every cold-related remedy at Boots; they’re lined up carefully on Nick’s bedside table.  Nick is making sure he spends two or three hours with Ella each evening, but by the time they put her to bed he usually can’t keep his eyes open a moment longer.  He feels terrible about it, about Harry, who isn’t actually his employee and who is carrying all three of them through the week.  When he tries to bring it up Harry waves him off and tells Nick that’s why he’s there and that he can handle it.  Nick tries to argue, but then he remembers just how tired he is, and he lets Harry force Echinacea drops down his throat and put him to bed.

“I’ll be in a little later,” he says, and Nick hums nonsensically in agreement before unceremoniously losing consciousness.

He wakes up before his alarm on Friday feeling as if the cold might actually be on its way out.  He can hear Harry in the shower, and he shuffles toward the kitchen, scratching his belly and rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.

A man comes out of his kitchen just as Nick is reaching for the light switch, and Nick yelps and practically falls on his arse and reaches out blindly for something to attack whoever the fuck is in his house with.

“Grimmy!” says the burglar, whose broad shoulders are taking up most of the kitchen doorway.

“Ahhh!” says Nick, pressing himself against the bookshelf.

The kitchen light comes on, and when his eyes finally focus Nick can see Liam’s close-cropped hair and the smooth line of his biceps.  He’s wearing a sleeveless top and track shorts and smells vaguely of mothballs when he comes to draw Nick in for a hug.

Nick hugs him back shakily.  “Are you feeling better?” asks Liam, broad chest rising evenly against Nick’s.

“Yeah.  Yes.  I think so,” Nick says, pulling back and shuffling into the kitchen.  The coffeemaker is already going.  “What are you doing here?”

“Harry and I are going for a run with Ella in the park later,” Liam answers as Nick hands him a mug.

“She won’t be up for a while yet,” Nick says.

“No, I know, Harry said,” says Liam.  “But he thought if we went before 7 or so there wouldn’t be as many people out, right, and there’s that path where we can push her pram along.  That way people won’t take pictures and she can keep sleeping if she wants, and she gets to go outside for a little while but we’ll wrap her up so she won’t get cold or anything.”

He sounds as if he’s repeating something directly.  Nick nods because the explanation makes just enough sense, and then he asks, “Did you sleep here?”

“Yeah,” says Liam.  “I came early yesterday night but you were already asleep.  Harry wanted us to leave together from here so there’d be less fuss in case someone was outside waiting in the morning.  Edd's also coming!” he adds, hastily.  Edd's one of their security team.

“That’s fine,” says Nick, watching coffee drip slowly (too slowly) into the pot.

“Harry just wanted you to know we’re going to be really careful with Ella,” Liam says, and Nick nods.

“Sure.  He’s always careful.”

“He’s really nervous about this,” says Liam, a little hesitant.

“About what?” asks Nick.  “The park?”

“No, you know, making sure you know he can take care of Ella, like,” says Liam, holding out his mug when Nick holds up the carafe questioningly.

“Of course he can take care of Ella,” says Nick, pulling his eyebrows together and looking at Liam quizzically.

Liam looks as if he’s building up to say something, but when he opens his mouth what finally comes out is, “Your spare room smells really, really weird, mate.”

Nick continues to look at him silently for a few seconds so he knows he’s not off the hook and then says, “Yeah, I know.  Amy left a packet of mothballs in the bed.  We threw it out and aired the room out for two days and changed the duvet cover, but the smell is clinging.  I’m going to kill her when she gets back; she’s a twatbucket.  We’re supposed to be adults.”

Liam laughs.  “Right, Grimmy.  Adults.”

Nick’s about to defend his third-decade-club honour, but Harry comes in then, already dressed to go running.

“Morning Li.  Hi Grimmy!  Do you want some breakfast?  Eggs or something?”

“Why are you acting like a robot?” Nick asks suddenly. 

He chastises himself for being so rude (and ungrateful; fuck) when he’s being offered breakfast but then he remembers he’s been meaning to ask this all week and has just been too ill and too tired to say anything.

“What?” asks Harry, his voice light.

“You’re up at 5am.  For the fifth time this week.  Miriam says when she arrived at 9am on Wednesday Ella was watching an educational French DVD and you were cleaning the oven!  We don’t even own an educational French DVD!  Now you’re asking if I want eggs!  At five in the morning!!  What the fuck is going on!?”

Nick can feel himself adding unnecessary exclamation marks as he goes on, but he can’t help it.  It’s like he’s been asleep for a week, which is practically true thanks to the cold from hell, and now he’s woken up and his brain is putting together all the little instances of Harry acting odd and the full picture is bizarre and somewhat upsetting, like those portraits of David Cameron made up of tiny photos of pigs.

“You should shower,” says Harry, placidly, glancing at the clock on the coffeemaker, which is flashing _5.08_.  “You’ll be late.”

Nick doesn’t move, and Harry sighs.

“It’s not going to kill me to wake up at five in the morning, Grimmy.  It hasn’t killed you so far and if ever there was someone who was in danger of being done in by early mornings I think we can agree it’dve been you.  You said you’d let me help; I’m helping.”

“Yes, and helping is fine, but I don’t want you to—” _stop walking into my kitchen with your curls in knots and your eyes half-open and your shuffling feet, like you belong here_ “—to act all funny when you’re about it!”

“What do you mean, funny?” says Harry, in a voice clearly meant to suggest that Nick is being ridiculous, but Nick can see the tension at the corners of his mouth and he doesn’t miss the significant look Liam shoots Harry when Nick throws up his hands in disgust and rolls his eyes.

“Like Harry fucking Poppins!  Just act the way you normally are!  Go out and get trolleyed with your mates tonight!  Wait until the very last minute to go get Ella out of her crib some day next week if you need to!  Just… be normal!”

Harry’s eyes go flinty, the way they only do when Nick’s said something to really hack him off.  Nick almost apologises on instinct (he never fucks up a little; he usually fucks up operatically) until he remembers that it’s Harry who’s acting strange.

“I can take care of Ella for two weeks without having to go get pissed,” he says, in a clipped voice.  “I’m not a kid, Nick.”

 _I take care of Ella and I get pissed in pubs all the time, what are you on about?_ Nick is about to ask.  But then he realises the clock is now flashing 5.14, which means he’ll be late even if he goes without a shower, which he can’t because there’s still crud in his throat and he needs the steam, and that Liam is standing awkwardly by the wall, intently inspecting Nick’s print of a tomato from a Victorian gardening manual, and that this is not a conversation that can be had in the next two minutes.

“We’ll talk about this later,” he says, pointing at Harry before walking to the bathroom and stripping off his shirt as he goes.  He calls back, “In the meantime I’d like my eggs scrambled, please.”

 

Nick is determined to talk to Harry when he gets back from the station, but Ian wants to go over the video segments for the following week before Nick leaves, and nobody wants to have a serious conversation once the sun has gone down on a Friday evening.  Plus the entire flat smells of roast potatoes and Nick _wants_ to pick up where they left off in the morning, but he gets distracted by the sight of parsnips and a chicken also browning slowly in the oven.  Harry may be acting odd, but Nick can’t deny that he’s keeping them very well fed.

Ella makes a huge mess (gravy is Nick’s and Aimee’s nemesis, and if the look on his face after Ella gets him right in the middle of his white t-shirt is any indication, it’s Harry’s now as well), and they spend ages giving her a bath.  She’s clearly having a wonderful time, laughing and splashing them, and Nick watches the water pooling all over the tiles with satisfaction as Harry soaps up her curls, giving her a fauxhawk with the foam as she giggles.

They wake up late—well, baby-late—the next morning.  It’s about half eight, and Nick can hear Ella babbling softly to herself over the monitor.  Harry is still in bed, and when he lifts his head from Nick’s shoulder to look at him sleepily, Nick beams.  It’s easy to ignore the twist in his chest because it’s blanketed by a warm, sleepy sense of contentment.

“Good job, Harry-bot,” he says, patting his curls absently.

“Daaaaaaaaddy,” calls a tiny voice from the baby monitor, and Harry huffs a laugh and lifts himself up on both arms, pressing his nose to Nick’s neck before rolling off the bed.

“I’ll get her,” he says.  Nick watches him walk away, picking up a t-shirt from the armchair as he goes, and reminds himself not to get used to this.

They give Ella breakfast and decide to go to the park.  It’s dry outside and not too cold, and Ella likes going to see people walking their dogs.  Harry bundles Ella into her outdoor clothes; she fusses a little but subsides when she sees the hat, which is blue and shaped like a bird.  It has eyes and a knitted beak and tassels shaped like bird’s feet.  Louis bought it for her and she loves it beyond reason. 

(Many of her favourite things are presents from Louis.  Nick has sometimes bought things he thought she’d love (one or two times with the express purpose of replacing a gift of Louis’, not that he’d admit this to anyone else) and she’s summarily dismissed them.  Louis’ presents, though—she actually ground Louis’ rubber duck into dust from playing with it so much in the bath.)

“Lou lou lou lou,” she says as they’re walking to the door.  Harry picks her up and she pats her hat for emphasis.

Harry ducks his head to hide his smile.  He knows Nick is grateful for how much Louis loves Ella, but that he doesn’t like reminders of how much better Louis is at picking things for Nick’s own daughter than Nick is.

“We’re going to the park, Bug,” he says.

“Puppies!!” Ella squeals, craning her neck as if that will get them out the door faster.

“If Louis gets her a puppy I’ll murder him, the bastard,” Nick says in a grouchy undertone as he locks the door.  Harry laughs at him and tucks Ella’s face into his coat against the wind.

They pick a bend in the path with some benches.  There are other parents with children there, and a few owners have stopped to let their dogs rest or to give them a snack.  As soon as Harry puts her down Ella stumbles over to a French bulldog that’s panting against a bench.  It’s massively overweight and drooling consistently out of the side of its mouth, which of course means that Ella loves it.

“Hi puppy hi!” she says, raising her hand to pet it.  Harry ducks down, quick as a fox, and catches her little wrist.

“Can she pet him?” he asks the owner.

“Sure,” the woman says.  She does a little double-take when she gets a good look at Harry’s face, and her eyes are wide when she continues, “He’s friendly.  Bit of a lazy sod, to be honest, but he really likes children.”

“Go on, Ella-bug,” says Harry, releasing his gentle grip on her arm.  She looks at him once more before tottering forward, her little hands landing on the dog’s head and back.

Harry skitters back a little, shooting the woman a friendly smile, staying near enough to reach Ella if she needs.  The woman opens her mouth to say something else, but Nick sidles up behind Harry and Harry turns, shooting him a grin.  Harry moves Ella so she’s standing right next to the bench but is still close enough to pet the dog, and the woman crouches down to speak to her dog and Ella as Nick and Harry sit down.

Harry watches as the dog licks a stripe up Ella’s face, and turns to Nick.  “Do you ever think about getting another dog?  Not one that Louis buys.”

Nick laughs a little.  “’Course.  It was sad to lose Puppy right after Ella was born.  She doesn’t even remember her.  And she loves dogs—well, you know she does.  She’d be well chuffed if we got one.  But we’ll do it when she’s a little older, I think.  One baby is enough for this family right now, thank you.”

Harry nods, glancing away and down at Ella, who’s waving goodbye to the French bulldog, and then stands up to help her walk over to what looks like a black Lab mix, whose owners also have a little boy.  Harry says something to them and the couple smile at him as he carefully sits Ella down next to their son.  Harry chats idly with the parents until they decide to keep walking, and then he crouches down next to Ella and asks her something as he adjusts her little hat.

Nick can see her sticking her tongue out at him, and Harry pokes her in the side and sticks his tongue out back, making a funny face.  Nick watches them, the flyaway dark curls sticking out from under their hats a mirror of each other’s.  Harry lifts her up and spins her, and they walk back to Nick’s bench with their noses pressed against each other, talking playfully.

Not for the first time Nick marvels at how much they look alike.  Ella takes after Nick more than she does Aimee, but she gets her eyes from Aimee’s side of the family, wide and blueish-green.  When Harry holds her up like that Nick doesn’t think there’s a person in the park who wouldn’t think she was his.

Harry and Nick chase her around the path and help her make friends with more dogs and owners until she decides she’s had enough.  Nick catches a couple of people taking pictures with their phones, but nobody approaches them, which is a victory as far as he’s concerned.  By the time they start walking home Ella’s tired enough that she puts her hat tassel in her mouth and rests her cheek against Nick’s shoulder, watching the street quietly as they walk.

“So you said earlier,” says Harry, looking up and to the right with the look of the carefully casual, “About one baby being enough.  You don’t think about having another one?”

“God, no,” Nick laughs, before he can really process the question.

Harry looks a little shocked, though he hides it quickly.  “Really?” he asks. “You’re so good with Ella.”

Nick shrugs.  “I’m kidding, mostly.  I mean, I don’t know.  Maybe.  I wouldn’t mind Ella having a brother or sister, but this is the only baby Aimes and I are having, she made that very clear in the middle of labour, and as much as I’d like to carry the next one I have been told that dream is medically beyond my reach.”  He laughs a little awkwardly, then continues, more serious this time.  “I mean, with the right person, sure.  I’d consider it.  Ella’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me; I wouldn’t mind having someone else to love this much.  But it’s not as if this is something that’s on the table for me right now, you know?  Parenting’s the busiest job I’ve ever had.  With Ella, Aimee’s the best partner I could have hoped for, too, but… I really don’t know that we’d ever consider having another baby, screaming during labour aside.  And if not with her then I think...  I think I’d want to be in love.”

He realises how close he’s skirting to things he doesn’t want to speak about, and repeats.  “Like I said, it’s not something that’s really on the table right now.”

Harry nods.  “I suppose not.  I just…”

They walk along in silence for enough steps that Nick feels okay to prompt him, “You just?”

“I just want you to be happy,” says Harry.  He’s smiling but his eyes look a little misty, and Nick feels a rush of affection for him, for the open and vulnerable way in which he cares, which Nick could never be brave enough to imitate.  He nudges Harry with his free shoulder and says,

“You’re a good egg, Hazza.”

“Yeah,” says Harry.  He smiles at Ella and lets her hold one of his fingers in a tiny fist.  “I know.”

 

Whatever lazy Saturday ease had crept into Harry’s bones is gone by Sunday.  By the time Nick stumbles into the shower he can hear Harry and Ella in the sitting room, talking and banging spoons around.  He showers slowly and considers whether a wank is a good idea (no, he decides, when he starts thinking about Harry right outside).  It’s nothing he hasn’t done before, but Harry wasn’t in the middle of eating cereal with Ella those times.

Nick towels his hair dry on the way to the kitchen for coffee.  At first he thinks Ella and Harry are watching CBeebies, but when he looks more closely it’s nothing he recognises, and he would wager a couple hundred quid that he can identify all of their programming at this point.  There’s a dog with blonde hair and a dog with a red hat kissing, being watched by some sort of strange green monster who appears to be perving on them from behind a hedgerow.  Then the two dogs are on a motorbike.  It begins to fly and before Nick knows it there’s a rainbow streaming out behind it and the two dogs are in space.  Nick is beginning to think Harry is showing his daughter a film about the dangers of LSD, but when he finally tunes in fully and gives the thing his complete attention he realises the characters are singing in French.

“Morning, Nick,” Harry says.

“Good morning, Harold,” Nick says wryly.  “I suppose you have some explanation for this.”

Harry shrugs one shoulder lazily; Nick can see the whole of one swallow on his collarbone as his t-shirt collar slips.  “It’s Follow Muzzy.  Gemma used to have it as a kid.  It looks all pants with this new animation.  I think it used to be a cartoon, but I don’t remember properly.  I was speaking to mum and she swears Gemma learned French from it when she was a toddler, but honestly I don’t remember her speaking a bloo— I don’t remember her speaking any French at all, so who knows.  I figure it can’t hurt.”

Nick is about to say something about how hallucinogenic dog-creature adventures probably _can_ hurt, but he’s stopped by the entrancing sight of the green monster and a lion and another weird dog creature on the screen.  “Au revoir!” they chorus, waving before they disappear from the shot, and Nick watches in astonishment as Ella waves at the telly and says,

“Ohbooar!”

Harry looks fit to burst a vein from excitement and Nick is fit to burst a vein from caffeine deprivation and too many odd happenings for this early on a Sunday morning, so he leaves them to it.  Harry’s clapping and celebrating like Ella just won the Nobel Prize; Nick just hopes this isn’t the start of his daughter not being sure what language to speak to them.  He can barely function in the mornings as it is.

(But maybe he’ll talk to Aimee about getting more of those dog-creature DVDs.  It really can’t hurt, he supposes.)

 

The reappearance of the educational French DVD is just the start; Harry keeps at his efficient governess act as the week goes on.  Nick tries to start a conversation about it more than once, but Harry either deflects or looks tense enough to snap, and Nick doesn’t have the heart to push it.  Aimee will be back in a few days and then he’ll take Harry out for a pint or seven and convince him that Nick and Ella are happy he’s there at all, and that he doesn’t need to take the nanny thing so seriously.  French lessons are very much not required, and what’s more, they’re making Nick feel guilty and weird.

On Tuesday night Harry suggests that maybe they could call Miriam and ask her not to come the next day.  Nick looks at him over his salmon and says,

“Her number’s on the fridge if you really don’t want her to come, but don’t you want a _rest_?”  Nick gets tired just watching Harry.

“No,” says Harry, reaching over to slice a broccoli floret in half for Ella before she picks it up.  “I’m fine.  No point having Miriam here when Ells and I will just be playing all day, right Ells?”

“Yeah!” she says, probably not understanding anything other than ‘play’.  Nick suspects this is the most fun his daughter has had in her entire life.  He hopes she doesn’t insist on going with Harry when it’s time for him to leave.

He gets back from the station on Wednesday to the sight of Harry asleep on his sofa, mouth open and t-shirt off.  There’s a blue streak on his cheek that looks like highlighter, and Emma is curled up against his chest, clutching a soft rabbit by the ear in one hand.  Nick slides his phone out from his pocket and takes a photo, careful not to make any noise.  He’s so busy thinking about what mocking caption to give it that he doesn’t look at it properly until he’s about to hit ‘post’.  When he’s ready his finger wavers over the button, then the photo, and he hits ‘cancel’ instead, taking four more pictures as Ella shifts on Harry’s chest and Harry curls his arm tighter around her.

 _Cutest children evr_ , he types, sending the photo to Pix and Ian and Louis.  He hesitates for a second, then sends the picture to Aimee as well.  He doesn’t type anything to go with it.

Thirty minutes later someone knocks on his door a little too loudly for politeness.  Harry starts awake, instinctively pulling Ella closer.  She wriggles but doesn’t wake up, and Harry’s face softens.  He cranes his neck to kiss her forehead and mouths what looks like _loveyou_ into her soft skin.

Nick has almost convinced himself that he hasn’t just been standing in his corridor watching Harry and his daughter sleep for half an hour, but when the knock comes again and he has to walk to the door in his coat he has to admit his alibi is weak at best.

“All right, Grimshaw?” says Louis, barging into Nick’s flat as if he owns it and walking straight to Harry and Ella on the sofa.  He’s got a shiny pink bag that bodes ill in his hand; he drops it by the coffee table and plops down onto the corner of the sofa, pulling Harry’s head into his lap and stroking his curls as Ella slowly grumbles herself awake.

“Be a love and get us some tea, Grimmy,” Louis says, reaching out with his other hand and turning the telly on.

“I have no memory of inviting you ’round for a visit, Tomlinson,” Nick replies as he hangs up his coat and scarf on the hooks by the door, absolutely on the wrong side of curt.

“Oh, mate, sorry, I thought your last message was a plea for help before you drowned in your own sop.”

“What message?” asks Harry, sleepily.  Louis reaches for his phone and Nick interjects loudly,

“Haz, do you want a cuppa as well?”

Harry turns half-lidded eyes towards him and says, “Yeah, Grimmy, thanks.”

Louis shoots a cheeky look at Nick over Harry’s head and puts his phone back in his pocket.

Nick gets a sippy cup of milk for Ella and three cups of tea.  She doesn’t like seeing others eat or drink if she doesn’t get to join in, and Nick has a sinking feeling he hasn’t been giving her enough milk lately.  His experience of parenthood is that it’s full of sinking feelings about his potential failings, but he doesn’t want his child to grow up knobby-kneed and pigeon-toed like certain people (well, not from lack of calcium, anyway).

When Nick carries everything out in a tray Louis has his head bent over and he and Harry are speaking quietly.  They’re so close their mouths are almost touching; Nick accidentally rattles the tray and Louis gives him a quick glance from under his eyelashes before straightening.  Harry looks cross, a little line of displeasure bisecting his forehead, and Nick puts his foul tea with three sugars in front of him as appeasement.  He slides the rest of the tray onto the coffee table and perches awkwardly on the little upholstered footstool that’s more decoration than anything else.

Ella’s awake enough now to finally notice Louis, and if Nick weren’t used to her enthusiasm around Tomlinson he’d take offence at how quickly she climbs over Harry to get to him, not even bothering to step around Harry’s face.

“Oy,” says Harry, around a mouthful of socked foot.

“Loulouloulouloulou,” Ella is chanting.  Louis swings her over Harry’s head and sits her on the arm of the sofa, holding on to her legs.

“Hello, princess.  We’re going to go do gymnastics tomorrow.”

“Im-six?” she asks, curiously.

“Gymnastics,” Louis confirms.  “I have a pressie for you.”

Ella is a vibrating, toddler-sized ball of glee.  Louis reaches around her to the bag he put on the floor, and pulls out a tiny children’s leotard for her inspection.  It’s black and has a green and blue dragon shooting down one shoulder with purple feathers arranged around its head at belly-button height.  Ella squeals at fever-pitch into Louis’ ear, but Nick is only marginally comforted by Louis’ wince.  Nick hopes Ella’s permanently damaged his hearing.

“I don’t recall agreeing to selling my child to the circus so she could become an acrobat in toddler-sized Moulin Rouge fancy dress,” says Nick.

It falls mostly on deaf ears, as Louis and Ella are conferring in half-speech-half-baby-babble and don’t hear him.  Harry pats Nick’s shoulder comfortingly as he goes past, tea in hand as he presumably goes to acquire some decent clothing for himself.

“Who said anything about acrobatics?” says Louis, holding Ella upside-down by the ankles as she laughs.  “Gymnastics, Nick.  Them’s two completely different things; Ella knows.  We’re going to Tumble Tots tomorrow.  Zayn’s coming too.”

“What the flipper is Tumble Tots?” asks Nick sullenly.

 _Flipper_? Louis mouths at him mockingly.  “It’s designed to develop motor skills for children age six months to two years, is what.  All of the fashionable parents are doing it, Grimshaw.”

“I think Harry said he and Ella were going to build a fort tomorrow,” Nick replies.

“Ella’s too young to build a fort,” says Louis, immediately.  He takes the leotard out of Ella’s hands and puts her down on the floor in easy reach of her toys to distract her.

Nick told Harry the same thing yesterday, but he’s not about to agree with Louis now.  The two of them have struck up a much closer friendship, based almost entirely around their mutual love for Ella (and their mutual dislike of almost everyone else), but the man sitting on Nick’s sofa now bears much more resemblance to the boy who seemed to hate Nick when they first met than to the Louis he went out to lunch with three weeks ago.

“They can build a fort if they want to,” says Nick, because the two of them have never met a disagreement they’ll back down from, not when Louis is like this.

“No,” says Louis.  He folds the leotard neatly, putting it back in the bag.  “We’re going to Tumble Tots.  It’ll be better for Ella, seeing other kids, and Zayn’s properly excited too so we can’t cancel now.  Harry’s spending too much time in your flat, anyway.”

“He is not,” says Nick.  It’s not his finest argumentative moment, considering that Harry is living with him and that Nick’s been thinking the same thing for the last week.

Louis glares at him, eyes like daggers.  “He has.  Making Sunday dinner and sleeping on sofas with Ella in the middle of the afternoon while you take pictures like a doting mum.”  Louis glances down the corridor and when he sees Harry isn’t on his way back, he says, “He’s not married to you, Nick, and he’s not Ella’s dad.”

“He—”  _He is_ , Nick was about to say.  It’s mostly reflex, disagreeing with Louis, but once he thinks it he can’t stop, and it’s as if some great sodding monster with a gaping jaw has taken a bite out of his insides.  _He could be if he wanted_.

Louis’ face softens everywhere except his eyebrows.  He keeps them raised, challenging, and when Nick swallows twice and doesn’t say anything his features harden again.

“Like I said,” he says.  “Haz’s been spending too much time here.”

Nick still can’t think of what to say by the time Harry comes back, so he picks up his tea and takes three too-hot swallows and stays silent.

“What’s this about gymnastics, Tommo?” asks Harry.  He’s blowing on his tea carefully as he sits, sipping it once before handing Ella her cup.  She looks at it, then at the toy lorry in her hand, and after a few seconds of anguished indecision she puts the lorry down and reaches for the cup with both hands.

“Tumble Tots,” says Louis.

“That class that Zayn was on about the other day?” Harry asks.

“Yes.  He’s coming too,” Louis says.  “I bet him fifty quid he wouldn’t wear a leotard so we’ll see what happens.”

Harry laughs.  “All right.  But if we’re going tomorrow morning—”

“Yes, yes, Zayn has to come here tonight, no driving to Nick’s flat in broad daylight and getting the paps’ hearts fluttering right before we take Ella out, we know.”

“Right,” says Harry.  He flushes a little.

“Have you asked the old pot and pan if he’s all right having all of your friends here overnight?” asks Louis.

Harry flushes even darker and elbows Louis in the side.  “Nick?” he asks, without looking up.

“This is Harry’s house too when he’s here,” says Nick, looking straight at Louis.  “He can have anyone he likes ’round."

This is not strictly true, obviously, because Nick is more persnickety than an unfriendly pensioner, but Louis is making him cross and Nick would never deny Harry anything he wants if it's to protect Ella. Nick doesn’t wait to see if Harry looks up before he turns and heads to the kitchen.  “I’m going to see if we have any decent biscuits.”

He’s not surprised when Louis sidles up to him as he’s staring into the cupboards.  Louis points at the chocolate digestives on the top shelf, turning warning eyes on Nick before he can ask Louis if he wants a ladder.  Nick takes them from the shelf and hands them off to Louis, and the two of them stand there holding the packet on opposite ends, not saying anything.

“Harry loves too hard,” says Louis, finally, looking straight at Nick.  “And too generous.  He never expects anything.  And you and me, we don’t know how to love like that.”

Nick nods seriously.  He agrees.

“You can keep your distance, make sure he doesn’t get too attached,” Louis says.  He pulls the packet of biscuits from Nick’s hand.  “Or you can have him here and let him treat Ella like his daughter, but then you need to learn how to love like him.”

Nick’s not sure he could ever do that.  To have Harry in his home, loving Ella and Nick like he does, and to be generous enough not to want to keep him forever, to want only the best things for him, to want him to be loved and love others the way he does Nick and Ella and find happiness and to never begrudge the person who gets him, but only be happy that they’re good for Harry instead.  Nick doesn’t think he could ever be that unselfish, but there’s a part of him that knows, knows with absolute certainty, that if he can learn that for anyone, it would be for Harry.

“You ask me,” says Louis as Nick thinks, smiling like Nick’s friend again, not like the unfriendly ghost of Christmas past, “The second one’s better for everyone involved.”

He speeds back to the sitting room before Nick can reply.

 

Nick is in a meeting with Ian and Fiona the next day when twinky intern’s laptop starts going mad.  Nick would normally ignore it, but twinky intern clicks on his mousepad a few times and starts laughing too hard for the rest of them to keep going.

“What is it?” asks Nick irritably.  Twinky intern is in charge of monitoring their social media—Radio 1 has a whole team and Fiona is in charge of media for the entire show, but twinky intern looks after Nick’s mentions on Twitter in real time and highlights things Nick might want to talk about on air.  When he twists the laptop around Nick can see he has Twitter open to a tweet with 6,700 retweets.  The username doesn’t look familiar.

 _OMG OMG_ , it says.  _@zaynmalik1D @Harry_Styles and @Louis_Tomlinson at my daughter’s Tumble Tots class!_

It’s linked to an Instagram photo.  Nick clicks on it uncertainly.  The shot is blurry; Nick can immediately recognize Ella in the background, though her face is turned into Harry’s shoulder and he’s half turned away; Louis is standing in front of him.  Zayn is in the foreground, looking intently at a blue mat with a red exercise ball.  He looks cross. 

It’s mostly because someone’s taking a photo of them at a class for children, Nick knows.  But knowing Zayn, it also has a fair bit to do with the knowledge that there’s going to be a photo of him on the internet in which a leotard with a feathered dragon is clearly visible under his hoodie.

 

 

Ella won’t stop babbling in the car on the way to pick up Aimee.  To hear Harry speak back you’d think she was carrying on a perfectly coherent conversation; as far as Nick can tell it’s mostly variations on “Mummy” and “ems”, which is Ella’s version of ‘Aimes’.

Aimee comes through the door to the baggage claim looking incredibly put together.  Her hair is up in a high bun and her makeup is perfect, but there’s a harried look in her eyes that only disappears when she claps eyes on Ella and Nick and Harry.  She hurries forward, letting her wheely suitcase skitter away when she gets to them.  She takes Ella from Nick and yanks him forward by the t-shirt, kissing him quickly on the mouth before turning her full attention to Ella.  Harry, who had gone to retrieve the wayward bag, watches them with such a warm, gentle look in his eyes that Nick can’t help himself—he reaches out and takes Harry’s hand and holds tight as Ella and Aimee greet each other.

“I’m starving,” says Aimee, kissing all over Ella’s face.  “I want the tartare from Café du Marche, god.  I also want to sleep.  Let’s compromise and go home and order burgers.”

Harry laughs.  He squeezes Nick’s hand and reaches into Nick’s coat pocket for the keys.

“Burgers, the tired woman’s tartare.  Come on, you lot.”

Nick watches his little girl chat away at her mum, keeping as close as he can as they walk towards the exit.  Harry is leading the way to the car park, stopping only to lower his beanie and raise his coat collar before the automatic doors open.

The trip home is the opposite of the trip after Aimee’s departure.  Harry’s iPhone is plugged in and playing music softly and Aimee and Ella are laughing loudly in the back seat, Ella already clutching some sort of monster plush toy in her hand that Aimee had in her carry-on.  Nick watches Harry navigate them home carefully, and as they’re winding their way past the Edgware Road tube he looks into the rearview mirror and asks,

“To yours, Aimes?”

Aimee looks at Ella and Nick and says, “I don’t think so, H.  Let’s all go back to Nick’s and have a slumber party.”

This is entirely in line with Nick’s every wish, so they tumble into his flat and turn on all the lamps in the sitting room, casting everything in a warm glow.

“Dibs on not sleeping in the mothball room!” says Aimee, as Harry wheels her bag towards the corridor.  Harry looks at Nick with a horrified twist to his lips and Nick shrugs.

“Put her in our bedroom.  Only because she just got home from Japan; if she’s here tomorrow she has to go sleep under the granny duvet.”

Aimee grins at him.  “You two are sharing a bedroom now?”

“Oh, hush up, you,” says Nick, crouching down on the floor to settle Ella into his lap.  “You’re the one who put the chemical weapon in the spare bed.”

Aimee laughs loudly, her mouth wide open with mirth, and even once she stops when she looks at Nick her eyes are still amused.  “I put a closed bag of mothballs on the bed as a joke, Nicholas.  You threw it out.  I believe you about it smelling musty as hell in there, because Zayn and even never-complains Liam have corroborated your story, but are you telling me you and Harry couldn’t pool your allowances together and get a new duvet for him to sleep with if it’s that bad?”

“I only get five pounds a week from my mum and I had to pay Louis back for the Tumble Tots class,” says Nick, with as much dignity as he can muster.

Aimee gives him a token laugh before she shakes her head and says, “You know we’re going to talk about this later.”

Nick widens his eyes pleadingly, which he knows has absolutely no effect on her, and says, “Yes, but can it be like, properly later?  Maybe when you’re back next month?  First I need your help with Robo-nanny Harry.  And then when you’re back in April we can tackle my delusions of domesticity, I give you my word.  It’ll be like a twelve-step programme, only with two steps.”

Aimee watches Harry bound down the corridor like a puppy and detour into the kitchen and says, “They don’t look much like delusions from where I’m sitting.”

“Don’t,” says Nick, quietly.

“Okay, babe,” she says.  “But when I come back there’s no level of ‘don’t’ that’s going to stop us from talking about this.”

“I know,” says Nick.  “I already spoke to Louis about gross feelings this week, though.  As you are well aware, that’s my limit, Ms. Aimee.”

“Do you want a glass of water, Aimee?” Harry calls suddenly from the kitchen.  “I always get thirsty after flights.”

“Yes, doll, thanks,” Aimee calls back, making an _adorable!_ face at Nick but also pointing at him with one carefully manicured finger.  It’s her _I’m not going to forget what you just promised_ finger.

They spend the rest of the evening stuffing themselves full of chips and burgers and playing with Ella.  She’s so exhausted by the end of it that she just drifts off mid-conversation, curled in Harry’s lap.

Aimee smiles down at her, with the same look on her face she always has when she really stops and looks at Ella.  Two years ago Nick wouldn’t have thought Aimee had that look in her, soft and awed and competent and nurturing.  Four years ago Nick was being discreetly sick into a construction skip in Shoreditch from too much champagne at a late lunch and Aimee had looked at a passing family and said, “We can’t all have babies; some of us just have champagne” into the father’s shocked face.  She’s still the same amazing woman, but some part of her has been transformed by Ella.  Nick feels privileged to have seen it happen, enough that he can say that without flinching or trying to avoid the sentimentality of it. He wonders if the same thing has happened to him, if anyone can just see it the way he can with Aimee.

 “I’m going to sleep with her tonight, okay?” Aimee asks.  She extends her arms and Harry hands Ella over, so, so gentle.  Aimee stands up with only some minor creaking of her knees and cradles Ella close.  “Thank you for looking after these two, Harry,” she says, and Harry ducks his head, a flush creeping its way up his neck.

“Of course,” he says.  “Always.”

Aimee smiles at the two of them and wriggles the fingers of one hand as a good night as she heads down towards her room.

Nick stretches, pulling his arms high above his head, and says, “Come on, Harold.  Time to go make ourselves smell like grannies.  It’s all the rage right now.”

Harry has of course moved their toothbrushes into the bathroom attached to the spare room, and Nick’s anti-ageing moisturiser that he hides in the back of cupboard above the sink and honestly didn’t think anyone knew about, and an old t-shirt for Nick to sleep in.

Nick stares at them and sighs.  The thing is, he isn’t stupid, though Finchy once made a very convincing case on air for just that. He even had Nick's mum call in.

Nick sees Harry trying to prove just how well he can take care of Ella and Nick, trying to make sure he’s doing the best job possible, but it’s baffling that he would feel he has to.  It reminds Nick of when Harry was still a teenager, always pulling Nick aside after Nick had introduced him to someone to ask if it had gone all right, if Harry had been all right.  It just so happened that most of Nick’s friends had liked Harry almost immediately, but if they hadn’t, it would have never been a choice for Nick, not even then.  Harry carved a space out of Nick’s life almost the minute they met each other, and made it so it could only be lived with him in it.  When Harry was 19, in his darker moments Nick would sometimes think how pathetic that was, and hate himself a little.  Harry is 26 now and maybe it’s still pathetic, but it is what it is and it’s not going to change.  _French lessons not required_ , thinks Nick again, a little maudlin.

Nick gets ready for bed and slides onto the unfamiliar mattress.  A few seconds later Harry turns the light off, shuffling his way uncertainly onto the bed.

Nick is still feeling a little raw from what he’s been thinking, so he hides his face in the pillow and mumbles, “Come here,” into the bedsheets.

Harry scoots over, fitting himself against Nick’s body.  Nick pushes at his shoulder until he’s lying flat on the bed, all angles from his broad shoulders to his waist, as tiny and slim as it’s ever been, from well before Harry had any real muscles to speak of.  Nick curls himself awkwardly into Harry’s warmth, folding his legs and putting his head on Harry’s shoulder.  Harry’s body tenses beneath his, almost vibrating, and Nick says,

“I can’t believe I own a flat that has a room that smells this way.  It’s a fucking disgrace, is what it is.  I can’t think of anything worse.”

Harry laughs, his body relaxing beneath Nick’s.  “Really?  Because I have some prawn cocktail crisps under the bed that I could eat right now.”

Nick smiles against Harry’s warm skin.  “Fuck off Harold,” he says, burying his nose against Harry’s neck.

“Okay, Grimmy,” says Harry, and then ducks his head closer to Nick’s as he drifts off to sleep.

 

They go to Balthazar for breakfast the next day, early enough to avoid the crowd.  Aimee tries to convince them that she’s never felt better than after two weeks of miso soup breakfasts, but she orders the full English along with Nick and Harry and manages to pinch an extra sausage from Harry’s plate while he’s turned away to talk to Ella.

Ella starts to fuss shortly after they get their food.  Nick is attempting to create the perfect toast-tomato-bean-egg ratio on his fork when she lets out the first whimper, and by the look on her face she will be committing to full-blown tears shortly.  She’s normally very good when they do decide to take her to a restaurant, but Nick is willing to concede that the poor duck’s had a very stressful two weeks.  He’s putting his fork down to pick her up when Harry sets his own cutlery down, plucks Ella from the high chair, and says, “I’ll take her.  You two finish.”

He bounces Ella on his hip as he walks, heading towards the wall with the wine bottles in an attempt to distract her.  Aimee stares after them, mouth pursed.

“You weren’t kidding,” she says.

“I said, didn’t it?” says Nick, putting two forkfuls of food into his mouth in quick succession.  He’ll go get Ella so Harry can finish his breakfast.

“He does know he’s not _actually_ the nanny, right?”

Nick shrugs.  “I told him!  Hasn’t made a difference, though.”

Aimee takes a sip of her mimosa and fixes Nick with a steely glare.  “Did you actually tell him, Grimmy?  Or did you just communicate via an interpretative dance of sarcasm and deflection?”

Nick thinks about it for a few seconds—he’s never going to be someone who has emotional conversations if they can be avoided, but when it comes to this particular issue he has been fairly clear at this point, he thinks—and Aimee pounces on his silence and says, “If you have to think about it, you haven’t told him.  I’ll take Ella back to mine when we get home, and you _speak to him_.”

Nick nods, shovelling more food into his mouth.  “I was going to anyway, Aimee; you don’t have to scold me like a naughty child.”

She has the grace to look a little sheepish, and Nick has the grace to look a little sheepish back.  He may have had it in hand this time, but it’s not as if he doesn’t need to be chivvied along 99% of the time.

 

They drop Aimee at hers so she can make sure her heating is on and get the house ready for Ella, and she comes by in her car about an hour later.

“I’d like the swell new dress I bought in Japan and my child, please,” she says when she knocks on the door, and Nick carries her bag out while Harry gets Ella settled in the car seat.

When the door shuts behind them Nick and Harry stare at each other, a smidgen uneasily.  This is the first time they’ve been without Ella in about three weeks, and for a moment Nick has an odd feeling almost like he doesn’t know what to say.

“Should I head home, then?”

“No!” says Nick, much more loudly than necessary.

Harry laughs.  “I can stay, mate.  I just wasn’t sure; maybe you want the afternoon to yourself.  I can come back when Aimee drops Ella off again.”

“Harry,” says Nick.  It comes out sharp and he takes a deep breath, rubbing one hand over his face.  “I haven’t spent time with you properly for two weeks.  I’d like to sit and drink some wine with you and watch a bad cooking show.  It’ll be nice to spend time together without the sprog.  And—oh, yes, wait.  _You are not actually our nanny_.  You don’t get to leave the minute Ella’s out the door.”

It suddenly occurs to Nick that maybe Harry _wants_ to leave, that he might need some time away from the flat and Nick, and he must broadcast his embarrassment because Harry rolls his eyes and says, “Don’t be silly, Grimmy.  I don’t want to go.  I miss you too.  Just wanted to make sure you didn’t want me to go, that’s all.”

“Well, I don’t,” says Nick.  He looks towards the kitchen and says, “I’m getting wine.”

“All right,” says Harry.  “I’ll go sit down.”

They drink their wine in somewhat comfortable silence for a few minutes before Nick screws his courage to the sticking place and says, “I mean it.  I know you’ve been trying to make sure Ella gets the best care, and I see how hard you’re trying to help us.”

“Nick…”

“No, let me just.  And we’re both so grateful—well, I’m grateful and I assume Ella’s grateful, I don’t know if she’s that emotionally sophisticated yet; with me as her dad she probably won’t master much past ‘awkward’ before her fifteenth birthday—but anyway, Harry, you don’t have to.”

“No, Nick, I know—” Harry begins, but Nick carries on.

“You don’t have to do anything to be here.  You’re family.  Ella loves you and Aimee loves you and we want you to be here and you don’t have to do anything else except just.  Be here.  Just be here.”

Harry looks as if he wants to say something else, but instead he takes a good long look at Nick’s face and just says, “Okay, Grimmy.  Thanks.”

He tucks his cold feet under Nick’s thighs on the sofa, and they watch a woman try to make a cake shaped like a shoe.

 

Nick knows almost straight away that his attempt at talking things over with Harry was probably rather on the poor side.  For one, Harry doesn’t look particularly relaxed, and didn’t even look relaxed then.  What’s more, Nick is starting to feel a little on edge himself, which his always a good sign that he’s mucked something up.

Ella spends most of the week shuttling between them and Aimee, though she seems to fuss every time Aimee drops her off.  She’s just old enough to understand that Aimee has been gone for a while, and if you ask Nick he thinks his daughter is bright enough to understand Aimee is going away again.  This means that every time Aimee comes ’round and drops her off for the night or the afternoon so she can do something, Ella protests.

A few days before Aimee is set to leave she comes by after Nick’s finished work to drop off Ella, who is crying as soon as she’s handed off to Nick.  Aimee looks apologetic (she and Nick had a conversation about whether she oughtn’t to stay and not go to Australia, but Nick told her he didn’t think that was the solution, and he stands by it even though it kills him to see Ella unhappy), and Nick rolls his eyes at their daughter as she strikes at his shoulder with one tiny hand.

“See you this evening, Aimes,” he says, and Aimee kisses him on the cheek and heads down the path with one more apologetic look, off to run whatever errands she needs.  She told Nick, but Nick can’t quite remember at the moment, with Ella sobbing in his ear.

Harry’s gone to the shops to get them more milk for Ella and eggs and coffee for the morning; when he comes back in the door Ella has progressed to outright wailing, face red and eyes scrunched up as fat tears roll down her cheeks.

“What did you do?” Harry asks.

“’m not Aimee, I guess,” says Nick, patting Ella’s back and walking her around the room to try and calm her down.

Harry puts the milk and eggs in the fridge and comes back out into the sitting room.  He reaches his hands out for her and Nick hands her over, willing to try anything even if it irks him that Harry might be able to calm her down when he can’t.  Ella subsides for a minute and Harry looks relieved, but the minute he shifts her to his other shoulder the wailing starts up again.

“Christ,” says Nick.  “Let’s see if going outside makes it better.”

Ella is normally a happy baby, so Nick is not used to the looks people apparently give you on the street when you’re walking along with a howling child.  He can tell the parents from the people who don’t have children because the former give them a slightly sympathetic look, while the others attempt to look neutral but can’t quite hide the suspicion in their eyes that Nick and Harry have done something to set Ella off, or are possibly murderers.

Thirty minutes of pointless walking and wailing later they head back to the flat.  Nick heats a bottle of milk, hoping to appease Ella, but she only bats it away with her hands and cries harder.

“Oh my word,” says Harry, quietly.  He looks pale.

Nick shrugs, motioning for Harry to hand her over.  He walks Ella back to her crib and puts her down, cradling her among her favourite soft toys before dimming the lights and walking out quietly.

“What are you _doing?_ ” asks Harry, clearly horrified.

“We’ve tried everything I know to try, Harold,” says Nick, tiredly.  “She’s not hungry; her nappy’s fine; she’s not teething.  We’ve played with her and tried to put her to bed and given her her toys and gone outside with her and put the telly on.  Let her cry.  Maybe she just needs to get it out.”

Nick and Harry sit on the sofa, listening to Ella cry.  They don’t really talk much, beyond two or three silly things; they show each other funny pictures and tweets on their phones and make fun of Ian’s @ replies.  When Aimee comes to collect Ella Nick wishes he could say it felt like anything other than a blessing.

“Good luck,” he says to Aimee.  Ella’s sobbing quite loudly into her shoulder, but Nick thinks she might be better once Aimee gets her home.  She’s staying there—Aimee’s spending two days with her before she has to leave again, though they’ve agreed to meet for lunch tomorrow.

Harry pats Ella’s curls gently as Aimee takes her away, looking as if he might cry himself.  Nick takes him by the hand and pulls him over to the sitting room and, once he has him where he wants him, he goes to make them cups of tea.

“Harold,” he says, once he’s back, handing his mug over.  “I know it’s not easy to see her that upset, but I promise it’s not unheard of.  It’s not even as unusual as I might like.  She’ll probably grow out of it once she can talk about things, tell us what’s wrong, but as long as crying’s the only way she can protest about how confusing this month has been, we’ll probably have a few more days like this.”

“No,” says Harry, brightly.  “I know.  I understand.”

Nick resists the urge to shake him by both shoulders and says, instead, “You know, it’s all right to feel frustrated and upset.  There are days when I want to lock her in a soundproof studio so I can see her through the glass to make sure she’s okay, but don’t have to listen to her.  It doesn’t make you a bad person.”

 _I hope_ , Nick thinks.  He and Aimee have mutually reinforced this point enough to each other that Nick almost believes it when he says it.

“No, I know,” Harry repeats.  “I can handle it.”

“I know you can _handle_ it,” says Nick.  “It’s just okay to want to handle it with a bottle of vodka glued to your hand.”

Harry laughs, but then he says, “If she’s still upset this week I’ll be better.  I just didn’t know what to do, like.  I’ve never seen her cry like that.”

There are many things Nick wants to say.  _You think this is the worst she can get?_ and _God’s sake, Harry_ , and _Can’t we not have this conversation and say we did_.  He finally settles on,

“I don’t know what to say to you anymore.”

“What?” asks Harry, his face wrinkled in confusion.

“I don’t know,” says Nick, throwing his hands up a little before settling them back on his lap.  “There’s only so much tea I can make and there are only so many ways I can tell you I trust you with her, and there are only so many times I can say you’re acting odd and it’s making me feel weird and I don’t know what to do anymore.  I’m so glad you offered to help with Ella, but I didn’t realise I was getting a nanny and losing my best friend.  Honestly, I’ve half a mind to just call the awful woman from the agency.  She’s a menace, but maybe that way things’ll be all right again.”

Nick knows he’s being dramatic.  He really doesn’t know how to comfort someone without making it at least partially about himself, and in this particular case he’s reached a point where he’s feeling rather personally affronted, whether it makes sense for him to or not.

Harry looks at him for a long time.  He drinks his tea and pulls on the collar of his t-shirt and carefully arranges his mug on a coaster on the side table before looking straight at Nick and saying,

“I just want to show you that I fit here.”

Nick looks at his impossibly green eyes, at the unhappy tilt of his beautiful mouth and at the tangle of curls where he’s been pulling at his hair, and he says, helplessly, “I don’t know what to do to show you that you already _do_.”

Harry looks as if he might cry, and that’s one more emotional development than Nick can take in one sitting.  He keeps talking.  “I know you’re worried about fucking up.  When Ella first came home with us I was absolutely paralysed with terror that I’d fuck up.  Fucking up with your child is the worst feeling in the world.  But you’re not on your own.  Fucking up alone is awful, but fucking up together… I think that’s just family, Haz.”

Harry smiles a little tentatively.

“This could have been awful,” says Nick.  “When Aimee said she was leaving I said yes but I wanted to say no.  I couldn’t imagine what it would be like—this could have been the worst time for me and Ella.  But you said you wanted to help and then you came here and you stayed and you turned this awful thing into something good.  I’ve almost had fun, Harold.”

“Nick…” says Harry, looking a little unsure now.  Nick knows he gets a look on his face when he’s speaking about this kind of thing that makes other people uncomfortable by association, and he feels a little bad for Harry, tries to make it better.

“I just want to say thank you,” he says, finally, resorting to politeness.  “And I…”

There’s a very long silence, and finally Harry smiles, warm and familiar, and says, “Me too, arsehole.”

Nick smiles back, but as he’s reaching for the mugs to take them back to the kitchen he can hear Aimee’s voice in his head telling him that she won’t love him any less if he takes the out, but that it doesn’t make him the best person, or the best example for Ella.  So once he has both mugs in his hand he leans over and hugs Harry awkwardly to his chest and whispers, fast but heartfelt, “I love you.”

Harry knows better than to say anything, but as he watches Nick walk away his eyes are soft, unfamiliar.

That night, he sprawls over the sheets, taking up more than half of the bed and clearly not caring, and when Nick fits himself against him he pulls him close and presses his lips to the hinge of Nick’s jaw and says, “Thank you.”

 

Aimee says goodbye to Ella at home.  “I refuse to make another scene in a public space, Grimshaw,” she says, and she hands off a happy Ella to Nick and puts her bags in the boot of Harry’s car.  Nick had offered to call her a taxi but she’d asked Harry to drive her instead.

“Look after Ella and after yourself,” she says, and Nick answers,

“Good luck with the babies’ recording.  I’m waiting to play the new album already.”

After Aimee and Harry head off Ella stays happy enough that Nick decides they’re not doing the airport again.  This is clearly the better option, and not just because he can shed a couple of tears and pretend he’s chopping onions.  He makes them both lunch and just as he’s putting together a sandwich for Harry the key turns in the lock and he comes through the door.

“Ella-bug!” he says, sweeping her into a hug and pressing small kisses along her cheeks and nose.  She laughs and bats at his curls, and he grins as he puts her back into the high chair.

“Hello,” he says, kissing Nick on the cheek too.

“Hello, Harold,” says Nick, wryly.  “Did you just have a wank in your car right outside my flat, because that’s not on.”

Harry laughs, going to stand behind Ella’s chair before he says, “You know how much I love those heated seats, Grimmy,” following it up with an uncomfortably authentic flick of his wrist and an orgasm face behind Ella’s head.

“You’re disgusting,” Nick says, but he means, _I love seeing you smile like this_.

 

They’re drifting off in bed a few hours later when Nick finally asks, “What did Aimee say to you?”

Harry turns his head on the pillow so their noses are almost touching, and says, “Same thing you did, really.  That I’m family.  That I belong here.  That if I love Ella this much I probably can’t fuck up too badly with her.  And that you’re happy I’m here.”

“And I suppose it matters more when Aimee says it, does it?” says Nick a little grumpily.

“Nah,” says Harry, contorting his body so that he’s wrapped around Nick.  “Just nice to hear it twice, innit.”

When the alarm goes off the next morning Nick has to push a dead-weight Harry off his chest before he can get out of bed.  He showers, drinks two cups of coffee, and checks on Ella, who’s sleeping peacefully.

“I’m going,” Nick says, finally, leaning over to brush Harry’s hair back from his face.

“Mmhkay,” says Harry, pushing his face back into the pillow.

“Ella’s not up yet, but you’ll hear her when she wants you to,” says Nick, motioning to the baby monitor.

“’lright,” says Harry.  “Probably going to wait ’til the last possible moment before I go get her, honestly.” 

He smiles at Nick, sleepy and clearly pleased with himself, blinking slowly.

“Okay, arsehole,” Nick agrees, and hurries out of the bedroom before he kisses Harry on his stupid mouth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. So the "update" is actually in chapter three above, starting after "In the meantime I'd like my eggs scrambled, please", but I think most people read the chapter before I added the second half (which is longer than the first) later in the day (true?), so I am putting this here to notify you it is there in case you a) did not know and b) wanted to be notified.
> 
> 2\. Yes, there are now five chapters in this thing rather than four, which I just did sneakily now, but I give you my word that this is not a George R. R. Martin plotline that grows and grows and grows like a manky weed. There will only be two more, and the snogging starts in the next one, but I tried to finish it in four and Nick Grimshaw from my head ran his hand over his soft, soft jorts and said, "You appear to think my neuroses would decrease if I had a child; let's acknowledge that that's laughable". I have a beta who is ruthless and much more disciplined than I so let's all thank the lovely Rosamund.
> 
> 3\. There is a(n extremely brief) mention of the death of a beloved pet for those who may be triggered.
> 
> 4\. I am told we now live in a social age so I am @tohenrydark over on Twitter and missingtheinvasion over on Tumblr. They both have pretty much nothing in them (the Twitter is actually brand spanking new) but let's be friends and we can talk about how One Direction is ruining my life?
> 
> 5\. I am just thinking now that when I replace this note with a chapter I"ll have to post another fake chapter to notify people so I have started a cycle of problems. Woot?
> 
>  
> 
> -v.


	4. Chapter 4

**4.**

It’s somewhat unpleasant to discover that in the middle of all his whinging about Harry acting like a robot, Nick was apparently being a twat as well and only half-realising it.  Enough of a twat that he may have been the direct (if partial) cause of Harry’s governess madness, even.

Harry starts sitting on the sofa again as if he’s looking to sink into the cushions, the way he always has since he helped Nick pick it at the shop, and Nick is surprised when he can feel himself getting looser around the shoulders as well.  The less he frets about Harry fretting the more his voice loses a strange sharpness he hadn’t even realised it had picked up, and it’s only once he’s more relaxed that he’s able to start catching Harry looking at him with something on his face that looks rather like relief.

Nick has possibly been more nervous about having Harry in his flat with him and Ella than he’d known, and has possibly blamed the entirety of the awkwardness on Harry as it may or may not have been more convenient for him to do so.  He honestly does not have much of a memory of acting strange before Harry started it, but there may or may not be precedent for this kind of glaring self-unawareness on his part.

The ultimate confirmation-slash-indignity is catching Niall and Harry and Zayn having a quiet chat in his kitchen after Nick’s put Ella down for a nap in the aftermath of an art class of some sort.  Zayn has so far exhibited an almost preternatural ability to find toddler activities around London, and Nick had come home to find them giving Ella a bath to try to remove what looked like a gallon of blue paint from her curls.  He’d sat on the toilet chatting with Zayn, who was sprawled on the tiled floor, as Niall helped his daughter turn his bathroom into a waterpark splash by splash.  Once he’d left an exhausted Ella napping he’d headed back to the kitchen for some lunch and overheard Niall saying,

“Don’t know what you donuts are on about, seems like the same old Grimmy to me.  Not acting any weirder than usual.”

“Well, not any _more_ ,” says Harry, and as Nick turns the corner, making noise to announce himself (he lives for a good eavesdrop about someone else, but has actually never overheard anything good about himself, not ever, which is as good a deterrent as any), he catches the end of Zayn’s sympathetic nod.

“Sorry,” Nick says, grudgingly and apropos of nothing as he and Harry are watching telly two days later.

Harry doesn’t ask _About what?_ or say _Don’t worry about it_.  But his hand curls a little more comfortably around Nick’s hip, and he sinks so far into the sofa he looks boneless.

 

There have been a fair number of pictures in the tabloids of Harry and Ella and the other boys so far, of course, but they don’t have a proper run-in with the paps until early April.  They’re at a bloody Nando’s, for fuck’s sake, having a late lunch with Bressie and Fiona and Pix and Niall and Louis and Niall’s girlfriend, Amanda, when two camera lenses make an appearance on the other side of the window, as well as two or three nervous-looking teenagers with phones.

Harry is in the middle of cutting up an apple he brought for Ella as a snack, and he and Louis instinctively turn their bodies to shield her slightly, but it’s clear the paps, at least, are probably there to stay when the harried-looking manager goes to usher them away and they only relocate to across the street.

Louis is wiping Ella’s messy face with a serviette he’s dipped in his water glass, but he and Harry both look tense.  They don’t get followed anywhere near as much as they used to, and the last time they got a proper mob of people near one of their hotels was almost a year and a half ago, but this kind of thing still happens on occasion.  They’ve mellowed their sound and they have much more control over what they sing and do than they once did; they’ve stopped looking like the market commodity the label once presented them as, but old habits die hard and the press and their fans still act a little mad sometimes.

“D’you want us to move?” Bressie asks, turning slightly in his chair so that his broad back is almost squarely to the window.  He’s not a fan of being hounded by the press when he’s with them, partly because when he’d first introduced his friend Amanda to Niall she’d been harassed for weeks.  Nick doesn’t think Bressie’s ever stopped feeling protective of her when she’s with the boys and cameras are around.

“Nah,” says Harry, finally looking up from the apple.  “If they get what they want we’ll probably not have to deal with something like this for a while.”  He goes back to meticulously cutting the apple slices in halves.

“All right?” asks Nick in an undertone, once the conversation has started up again.  The more determined of the two paps has crossed the street again and done one or two run-byes, taking pictures right up against the window.

“Yeah,” says Harry, making a clear effort to relax.  “You know I don’t mind when they take pictures.  Who could resist this face?” He stops to give himself a congratulatory smirk as he points at his own cheek.  “And we get family pictures taken all the time.  What are they going to say this time that’s different?  People are probably bored of photos of us walking outside with Ella, doing nothing.  But I still don’t like having her in pictures any more than you do.”

Nick—along with everyone in Britain—is keenly aware of this fact.  There’d been a bit of a stir the year Ella was born when the boys had been doing a performance on _X-Factor: Relaunch_ and they’d been asked about a disagreement Liam had had with a reporter over a picture taken of him with Lux.

“Our fans are the best, and we’re always so happy to talk to them, and we know reporters are taking photos for them to see, and that’s important, right,” Liam had said, quietly.  “But it’s different when it’s other people, a little girl who understands she’s being followed but doesn’t really understand why, like.  It’s not the same as when she was a baby.”

“It’s not the same as it was a few years ago full stop,” Zayn had chimed in, also quiet but firm.  “We love how much our fans care about us; we’d never be here without them and we’re more grateful than we can say.  But we’ve been together a long time, all of us.  We’re all a little bit older and wiser now, yeah?”

He’d winked at the crowd and there’d been some half-hearted screams, everyone seemingly unsure what to do with the band’s suddenly serious demeanour.

“No pictures when you’re walking with Grimmy’s little girl and twisting your face up, is what you’re saying, right lads?” the interviewer had asked, trying to lighten the mood. 

There’d been a set of pictures of Harry making ridiculous faces into Ella’s pram on the street that had made the rounds everywhere, just before Liam’d talked to the pap outside Lux’s school.  Harry had looked approachable and silly and, in one or two of the shots, absolutely hilarious.  Two of the pictures had resulted in memes that are still going around often enough that Nick gets one in his inbox once a week, at least.

“Yeah,” Louis had replied.  “Exactly.”

He’d said it with no trace of humour in his voice, though, and despite the fact that all five of them had made an effort to move the conversation along and had been wonderfully charming the rest of the interview, there’d still been stories about their entitlement and arrogance for days after in the fucking _Sun_.

It had blown over relatively quickly, given that it was hard to argue with the boys trying to protect the children in their lives, and because no one was more grateful for their success than they were, and people knew it.  But Nick knows for a fact that they’d had a number of stern talking-tos from management for the next month, yet another wrinkle in their shifting relationship.  They’d just agreed to a three-year contract that only required them to produce one album, and some people at Columbia were still smarting over the fact that they had to deal with a band now, and not just a product.

Nick is all for his daughter being left to grow up in peace, but he hopes there isn’t a repeat of that conversation.  He doesn’t want him and Ella to be something that Harry has to worry about in his professional life.  Nick worries enough about being too much of a hassle as a human being to also dwell on what kind of hassle he could be, publicity-wise. 

In the early days he’d spend hours at a time thinking that he and Harry probably ought to spend less time together, turning the possibilities over in his mind every time he got asked about it for a magazine or on TV.  In the end he decided it was probably best if he didn’t overthink it, if he trusted Harry to make his own decisions.  He’d mentioned it to Harry once in an attempt to make sure _someone_ did (not that he imagined the label hadn’t), but when Harry had looked confused and a little hurt Nick had immediately dropped it.  He had wanted the best for Harry, but not enough to be the one to send him away.  Louis knows what he’s talking about when he says Nick doesn’t know how to love that way.

He’s tried his hardest not to think about it in the last six weeks, either.  He’s been worried enough about Harry living with them without also thinking about how else this time at Nick’s might end up being an inconvenience to him.  Of course now he’s thinking about it even though he promised himself he wouldn’t, enough that he starts feeling a bit nauseous as he looks at his veggie pita sitting on his plate.

“Finish your apple or no sweets after, lass,” says Niall, and Nick looks up to see him and Louis constructing a careful (and disgusting) pile of apple and chips and coleslaw on Ella’s plate as Pix laughs.  Ella’s hands are a mess and Nick is grateful someone thought to shove four serviettes into her collar to serve as a bib.

“Are _you_ all right?” Harry asks, leaning close when he realises Nick hasn’t been paying attention.

Nick is about to say they can talk about it later, but as Harry looks at him with a deep crease on his forehead he all of a sudden hears what Harry just said— _We get family pictures taken all the time_ —and though he still feels panicky and weird he makes a conscious effort to hear what is being said to him, since he’s had enough of being a twat who makes Harry nervous for the month. 

(Possibly, anyway.  He’s trying.  The family thing makes him panic, too, but in a different way, in an _everything I want but probably nothing I’ll get to keep_ way, and that’s on him and has nothing to do with Harry.)

“’m okay,” he says, and shoots Harry a grin.

On the way out the two photographers circle them uneasily for the first few streets of the walk home.  Amanda is tucked between Bressie and Niall, and Pix and Louis have got Ella.  Fiona, Nick, and Harry are walking slightly behind the rest of them, and Nick is cautiously pleased to see the paps sticking mostly to them, sometimes to Niall and Amanda.   Neither really makes a move towards Ella.

“That was good,” says Harry, later that evening.  He’s taking glasses out of the dishwasher and putting them away, and he smiles at Nick almost shyly.  “Right?  They didn’t bother Ella.”

Nick has the odd sense that Harry is looking to him for approval, when Nick was about to offer reassurance that Miriam could take Ella out the next few days, if Harry thought it’d be best.

 _Oh_ , he thinks, like watching a drop of water hit a very still pond.

“She’s always all right when she’s with you,” he says, leaning down to help with the bowls.  Their hands tangle as they reach for the same thing, and they look at each other over the steaming crockery.

Nick fights the urge to look away, and a smile blooms slowly on Harry’s face as their eyes hold.  His grin is dimpled and he looks earnest in a way only Harry can be, and Nick has seen the same smile on his face many times before.  The familiarity of it doesn’t stop it feeling like something new, though, and Nick smiles back before he turns away to put the bowls in the cupboard, and thinks, _fuck_.

 

Nick Skypes Aimee from the station because the time difference works out best, and also because he knows when to accept that he needs help.  And is afraid of Harry overhearing.

He’s just finished the show and Aimee is eating dinner in the house they’ve rented in Sydney.  Nick can see the last of the sun filtering through the window as Aimee unceremoniously puts a huge piece of sushi in her mouth.

“Very charming,” he says, and she raises her middle finger at him.

“We’ve been at the studio until now; I skipped lunch,” she says, after she swallows.

“Oh,” says Nick, craning his head as if he’ll somehow be able to see more of the room on Aimee’s end that way.  “Baby band around?”

She rolls her eyes, “For your existential crisis?  No; I sent them out for a night off.”

“I didn’t say it was an existential crisis,” he says, trying to look as if it’s patently ridiculous to suggest this.

“You volunteered to talk about your feelings and set a Skype date with a time and everything,” she says.  “It’s an existential crisis.”

Nick blows a breath out and looks at a picture of Britney Spears eating a taco that he has hanging on his office wall.

“So,” Aimee says, looking down at her nigiri and trying to pick what to eat next.  “You finally going to nut up and take this to the Neil Patrick Harris family portrait place?”

She’s kidding, but Nick also hears the warm approval in her voice.  He’s so happy that he can, because he wouldn’t—  Ella comes first.  He trusts Aimee to make it clear if this isn’t what’s best for her.

“I don’t know, Aimes,” he hedges, because he can’t really imagine a world without Harry in their flat anymore, but he physically can’t bring himself to imagine a world in which they make a space for him in their lives and he leaves them, not because he’s unkind but because he’s an internationally famous popstar, and because that’s _life,_ far as Nick can tell from his experience of it so far.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Nick,” she says.  “I know you haven’t had sex in a while, but it’s not that complicated, surely.  Tab A, Slot B, then as you’re lying there sweetly entwined you can confess your lo—”

“It’s not just sex,” Nick interrupts, rushing through it before he overthinks it.

Her face softens.  “No, sweetheart, I know.  I meant—”

“It’s not just sex because we’ve had sex before,” says Nick, and as nervous as he feels he can’t help but feel satisfied at the way her mouth rounds into an _o_ , the way her sushi splats back onto the tray from where her grip on her chopsticks has gone lax.

“When?” she asks, picking up her sushi again and clearly trying to school her face back into neutrality.

“A few years ago,” Nick says.  He looks at Britney Spears by the taco truck again.  “2016.  They had a short break in the middle of their European tour and he came to mine and we shagged for two days straight.”

“How was it?” Aimee says, because she has her priorities straight.

Nick huffs a laugh.  “Good.  _Brilliant_.  Scorching.”

“And?” Aimee says.

“And he went back on tour and then they made another record and I went to afternoons and did that music quiz show and had less time in the middle of the day to muck about, but we still talked all the time and our lives went on,” Nick says, purposefully avoiding the question. 

Aimee quirks an extremely unimpressed eyebrow at him, and Nick sighs.

“I know you all think we’re some sort of emotionally stunted idiots, sharing a house and a bed and pretending that’s the way normal people behave.  It’s not.  But… we’ve talked about this.  He was dating that boy, remember? They broke up and a few months later he came home from tour and we had mind-blowingly good sex.  I honestly think it had been building for a while.  And then I sent him off back on tour and we agreed that was that.  We talked about it.”

“You talked about it?” Aimee says incredulously.

“Yes,” Nick says, a little cross.  “We talked about it.  We said how good it was and agreed neither of us wanted to make more of it or was looking for anything serious or was willing to risk what might happen to our friendship.  He went back to Germany and then on to America, and I dated Julian, and we carried on doing normal things.  We agreed we were better friends and that we would _always_ be friends, and so even though now he’s in my house looking after Ella and we do the washing up together we don’t…. it’s not that we’re idiots.  It’s that we talked about it and decided we didn’t want this, and I don’t know that I can be the one to push.”

“Grimmy,” she says, her face the picture of disbelief.  “Shovel it deeper, honey, I don’t think you’re quite up to your nose in bullshit yet.”

Nick laughs a little acidly.  “No, I mean… I want it now.  Obviously I want it.  At the time I didn’t.  We agreed it was just a bit of fun and I was happy that it was so good and relaxed.  When he came back we watched _Great British Menu_ and it was just like it was before I put his cock in my mouth, and I was _happy_.  I felt a little up myself about it, honestly, how well we’d handled it.  Like proper adults.”

“He has a big dick, doesn’t he?” asks Aimee around her sushi, and Nick laughs again, louder and more sincere this time.

“You’ve seen him starkers at some point, surely,” he says.  Harry spends a lot of time with them, and the importance One Direction attaches to wearing clothing appears to decrease with every record they put out.

“Yeah I’ve seen him naked,” Aimee says, reaching for something out of the frame.  It’s a beer.  “But I haven’t seen him _naked_.”

“Can we get back to my existential crisis please?” Nick asks.

“In a minute,” Aimee says.  “I’m picturing the two of you having sex four years ago and I’m half turned on and half creeped out like I just caught my parents fucking in the kitchen or something.”

Nick gives her a minute.

“So now what?” she says finally.  “I’ve seen the two of you, Grimmy.  You’re not acting like two people who are happy to send each other off to another continent with a pat on the back and a _thanks for the awesome dicking_.”

“Inappropriate,” says Nick, wrinkling his nose.  “You’re a mother.”

“You’re a father,” she counters, tipping her beer to him on the screen.  “I mean it.  I mean, I hear you, Nicholas.  You decided you were better as friends and you have been, and he’s one of the three most important people in your life; I get that.  It’s not easy being the one to start that conversation a second time, and it could blow up in your fucking face, though that seems unlikely to me.  But you’re a father now. You had a child and changed jobs and changed back again and he recorded two more albums with his friends and he learned to play the guitar well enough to do it on stage every night.  Last time I saw him on television I couldn’t believe the man sitting on that interview couch was the same boy you introduced me to way back when.  He’s helping you raise our kid right now, Grimmy.  So much has changed.  Isn’t it worth asking what he wants now?  Because that could have changed too, surely.”

“What if he doesn’t want what I want?” asks Nick, in a very very small voice.

Aimee shrugs.  She looks sympathetic, but she says, “Then he doesn’t.  But you’re in love with him and he lives with you and our daughter and you need to say something.  And I just spent two weeks with both of you Nick, not just you.  Like I said, you don’t look like people who are even in the same realm as ‘just a bit of fun’.  Just the opposite.”

Nick says, “He’s going on tour in July.  Either way he leaves when the summer comes.  And then what?  I wait for him to come back and he probably doesn’t and I’m a sorry mess and Ella grows up with a father who weeps when people kiss on the telly.”

“Leaving aside the fact that I’ve seen you cry at that wedding planning reality TV show more than once,” Aimee says, eating the last of her sushi, “Are you seriously trying to tell me that if you don’t sleep with him and he leaves in July and doesn’t come back it’s going to hurt you any less, just because you didn’t have sex and you avoided talking about how much you wanted more, even though you’re thinking it all the time?”

It’s a convoluted question, but Nick doesn’t have to think about it for longer than a second before he says, “No.”

“Would sleeping with him at this point make any difference to how you feel?”

“No,” Nick is forced to admit.  “Honestly at this point it might help.  I didn’t know where to put my arms in bed last night without giving away that I want to get married and have more babies with him and then after you meet whoever you want and probably also have more babies we’ll buy a caravan and go to Devon on holiday and we’ll make egg and cress sandwiches for all eight of the children to eat during the trip but they’ll be little shits who want Burger King anyway so we’ll stop at a service area and accidentally leave one of them behind.”

He’s trying to make a joke of it, but even he can hear the plaintive pathetic tone to his voice.  Aimee does him the kindness of not commenting.

“So say something,” Aimee says.  “Before you come out with the same kind of vaguely unhinged thing but it’s to him instead of me.  Say something, and work it out, and tell him I’ll fuck him up if he fucks you up, but that there’s a place for him in our lives.”

She says it so matter-of-factly, as if there’s nothing to be uncertain about, and Nick loves her so deeply in that moment that he can feel his heart physically beating with it.  It’s not that he hadn’t come to the same kind of conclusion himself, but he knows better than to trust himself with these things, and even if he didn’t, her blessing means everything.

“I love you,” he says, and her perfect eyebrows go up the tiniest bit.

“You’re growing as a person, Grimshaw,” she says.  “Not a lot, so I’m going to leave you to freak out now while you talk to the Britney Spears picture on your wall, but I love you too.”

She blows him a kiss; Nick is smiling when they disconnect.  And if he and Britney have a little heart-to-heart, no one is ever to know.

 

Watching Aimee inhale sushi makes Nick hungry, so he texts Harry that he’s having a quick lunch with Ian and the two of them head out to a tiny Japanese place that’s just opened near the station.  They order too much food and Nick, who is feeling genial and emotionally able after his conversation with Aimee (this is clearly a mistake, but what is he to do about his own hubris) tells Ian that Aimee asked after him and says they should all go out when he gets back.  Ian’s a good sort, and the way he fancies Aimee has always been painfully obvious.

They talk a little longer than Nick plans to, mostly because Ian asks if Nick wants to keep doing breakfast and they end up having a much more serious conversation than expected, in which they both admit that there’s something about the breakfast slot beyond the hours that can feel a little exhausting sometimes, and Nick secretly admits just how much he always loved nights and how he misses them, every once in a while.

They don’t call it planning for the future but it’s clearly edging towards that, and they head back to Nick’s flat with Nick feeling even more self-satisfied than before.  He _is_ growing as a person, he thinks.

He reverts to his more familiar level of emotional uncertainty the minute they open the gate in front of Nick’s flat and step onto the path.  Ian walks into his back and asks, “All right, Grimmy?” and Nick has to shake himself and keep moving as he searches for his keys.

“Heya, Harry,” says Ian as they come through the door.  The lights are on and Nick can hear the wretched French DVD playing in the background.  Nick drops his keys on the side table by the door and as he and Ian turn the corner they almost walk into what looks like every sheet in the entire flat, arranged carefully in a giant tent-like shape across his sitting room.  There are sheets snagged on the corners of the heavier frames against the wall; pulled taut against the back of the sofa and the armchair.  The carved Balinese trunk that Harry got Nick for his thirtieth birthday is balanced precariously on a side table, clearly holding the left side of the tent up.

“Hullo,” says Harry, emerging from behind a flapping sheet.  He crawls out and stands up and gives Ian a hug, and Nick a kiss on the cheek.  “Told you she wasn’t too young to build a fort,” he says, before motioning them in.  “Come on.  We have nibbles and a film in there.”

Nick shakes off his jacket and says to Ian, “You don’t have to.”

“You do!” calls Harry from where he’s crawled back behind the sheet.  Ian looks much too excited by the entire affair, to be honest, and he drops his bag to the floor immediately and slinks in after Harry.

“…speaking to Aimee on Skype,” Ian is saying as Nick crawls awkwardly after them, trying not to knock something over with his bum.  _Traitor_ , he thinks, but he can’t say anything to Ian when Harry turns worried eyes on him and says,

“She all right?”

“Yeah, grand,” says Nick.  “Recording going well.  Just hadn’t spoken in a while just the two of us.”

Harry gives him a look; the three of them had spoken to Aimee four days ago, and Nick had taken the tablet back to his room to chat with her a little longer as Harry gave Ella her bath.

“What’s this, then?” Ian asks, nudging his shoulder towards the television.  Ella is sitting in front of it, entranced, but Nick is mostly focused on the fact that the sheet that’s attached to the television looks as if it might knock it off the furniture at any moment.  Nick likes his television.

“Harry’s teaching Ella French,” he says, and Harry rolls his eyes at him.

“Well, the video’s teaching Ella French.  Don’t speak a word of it meself, though I wasn’t too bad at it in school, I don’t think?  How is it possible that I don’t even remember properly?  I’m getting old like you, Grimshaw.”

Nick narrows his eyes and is about to retort when Ella turns her little head to glare at them as if to say, _You’re interrupting_.  The three of them lower their voices.

“Why are those dog things eating fruit?” asks Ian.

“A question for the ages, mate,” says Harry, leaning back against the sofa.  He holds up a bowl.  “Crisp?”

“Mmh,” says Ian, and when the two of them give every impression of actually watching the DVD with concentration, Nick huffs in disgust and pulls out his phone to check Twitter.

The days are getting warmer, so they take Ella out to the park after Ian heads off.  She runs around until the sun is going down and she and Nick and Harry are all exhausted, and once she’s in bed Nick looks at all the sheets in his living room and feels too lethargic to do much about them, though he knows they ought to.  Harry’s puttering in the kitchen and when he comes back out he has a bottle of wine and two glasses in hand.

“Want to go in the fort and get tipsy and watch _Love Actually_?” he says, eyes sparkling. 

Nick looks at the bow of his mouth and at the way his long fingers are curled around the neck of the wine bottle, bracelets clinking against it, and thinks that if he’d allowed himself to do this from the start something would have probably gone horribly wrong in the first few days of Harry living with them.  It’s a little much, seeing his best friend and this boy who loves his daughter desperately and this man with the endless neck and the dimples in his cheeks all superimposed on each other, everything Nick wants standing in his living room.

“We could do that, Harold,” Nick says, trying to downplay his enthusiasm at the suggestion but probably giving himself away with his smile.  “Let me change first.”

When he crawls back into the fort Harry has spread out the cushions from the sofa and some of the pillows from the spare room into a kind of nest.  Nick looks around the billowing sheets and at Harry sprawled back against the cushions and is grateful that Harry was stubborn enough to go ahead with his fort idea anyway, though Ella probably just watched as he constructed the whole thing himself.  There’s something quiet and private and slightly more manageable about being under the slope of the linens, the sheets keeping the rest of the world out.  Harry hands Nick a glass of wine and waits for him to settle in before saying,

“What did you have to speak to Aimee about?”

Nick contemplates how to answer.  He doesn’t have the energy to talk to Harry about everything right now, but he wants to say something.  He takes a sip of his wine and then finally settles on, “You.”

Harry looks at him, eyes searching.  He must be happy with what he finds, because he says, “All right then,” and curls his body against Nick’s, then hits play.

Nick strokes his curls and breathes in the last traces of his cologne and enjoys the feeling of warm sleepy boy next to him, and he doesn’t even feel like crying when Emma Thompson puts the Joni Mitchell record on.

 

They wake up in the very early morning to the sound of Ella’s voice on the baby monitor.  Nick glances at the clock; it’s not quite quarter to five yet.  Ella sounds unconcerned, so Nick gives himself a minute to get his thoughts together before deciding if she needs getting.

Harry slowly rolls awake next to him, and Nick starts when he feels Harry tense next to him on the bed.

“What is it?” asks Nick, glancing towards the baby monitor, from which Ella’s happy voice is still coming.

“Nick,” says Harry urgently.  “ _Listen_.”

“Hazza, Haaaaaazza,” Ella is calling, syllables perfectly distinct.  Then, “Harry Harry Hazza Harry!”

The _r_ s are slightly soft around the edges and the _Hazzas_ are a bit blurry too, but Harry still has a grin the size of England on his face.  Nick tugs at his curls and settles one hand in the dip between his shoulder blades and says, “She probably just got woken up by something outside.  If you go get her she won’t go back to sleep and she’ll probably be a terror all day because she’s tired.”

Harry must take Nick’s indulgent smile for what it is, because he says, “But I _can_ go get her, right?”

“Yeah,” Nick says, smiling wider, and Harry rolls out of bed so fast Nick almost feels a little insulted, loping quickly out the door and down the corridor.

Nick turns the alarm off before it can ring and stumbles into the shower, and he comes out to the kitchen to find Harry putting strawberries into bowls of porridge.

“Morning,” he says, but Harry and Ella are too busy having a moment to pay him much mind, though they both look up and smile at him.  Nick shuffles around them and makes toast and tea and gives them both a kiss on the cheek on his way out, with a short, “Try not to explode from excitement,” to Harry.

Harry pokes his tongue out and doesn’t call Nick out on his hypocrisy (he’d Facetimed Harry in the middle of the day when Ella had first said, ‘Daddy’, and then he’d recorded her doing it and sent it to all his friends and family, and then he’d recorded her doing it _again_ and sent a follow-up) and says, “See you when you get back.”

“Bye, Ella-bug,” says Nick.

“Bye daddy,” she says, and then, “Harry! Look!” as she points at her porridge.  Harry flicks her tiny nose and smiles as he looks down.

Nick leaves them to it, but he can’t help but grin the whole way to the station.  There’s something warm deep in his chest and he feels the way he did when Ella took her first teetering steps, the first time she called Aimee, “Mama” (well before she mastered ‘Daddy’, which drove Nick bonkers at the time).  It’s knowing that she’s growing up and that she’s okay; that she’s becoming a little person of her own bit by bit, and that Nick and Aimee—and Harry—love her and aren’t fucking her up too badly.  It’s hard to explain just why the feeling is so good, but it is.

He must look like a right twat when he arrives, because about half an hour into the show Fiona asks,

“What’s got you so happy, then, Grimmy?”

There’s more than a hint of innuendo in her voice, and she follows it up with a wanking motion right in front of her face, just in case Nick didnt’t get it, he guesses.  He flips two fingers up at her and says,

“Ella learned a new word today.”

Fiona’s face immediately softens, and even intern with the beard looks charmed.

“Yeah?” Ian asks.  “Was it, ‘Why are you waking me up at this ungodly hour to make me show you a new word, daddy?’”

“She woke up all on her own, Chaloner, if you must know,” Nick says.  “Must have been excited to show off.  Can’t imagine who she takes after.  Probably her mum.”

He smiles again, and he can actually feel how big and stupid it is, stretching his face.  Fiona asks, “It was a good one, then?”

“Yeah,” Nick says.  “One of the important ones.  Kind of word you use for the rest of your life, really.”

“That’s ace,” Ian says, his eyes also soft now, though his tone is still mocking.  “Good morning, then.”

“Good morning,” says Nick.  And then, partly because intern with the beard is looking at him like he can’t believe Nick is about to do this again, and pushing people makes Nick happy, “Here’s some One Direction to go with it.  Let’s all take a moment to remember another good morning, in which Zayn Malik dressed in drag.”

 

When Nick walks out of the studio Harry and Ella are sitting in his office, talking to twinky intern.  Nick heads toward them and says,

“’m done.”

Harry stands and picks Ella up, handing twinky intern—okay; Oscar—his jumper back.  Ella had it in a little ball and Nick thinks it will probably never be the same.  He might have to offer to buy a new one, because the Beeb isn’t paying the interns any more than when Nick first started working there, which is to say that they sometimes spring for some dodgy Tesco’s sandwiches but that’s about it.

“Thought we could go to lunch together,” Harry says, handing Nick his jacket with his free arm.  He’s wearing an old long-sleeved white Henley and Nick can see the shadow of his tattoos against the fabric.

“Sounds good,” he says.  He takes Ella so Harry can put his jumper on.  As they head towards the door, he asks, “You listen to the show, then?”

“Yeah,” says Harry, bumping his hip against Nick’s and smiling.  “We did.  Right, Ella-bug?”

“Harry!” she says, and Harry kisses her cheek.  Nick presses his hand to the small of Harry’s back and leads them out onto the street, and feels warm and lucky and happy and, rare for him, unafraid.

 

They get salads for lunch and then decide they better do the shopping before they completely run out of food, so they head to Sainsbury’s and try to get what they need as quickly as possible, before Ella loses her patience.  She’s blinking drowsily throughout and she falls asleep in the car on the way back; they leave her to nap when they get home.  Nick puts the washing on as Harry makes tea.

When Ella wakes up the sky has gone overcast but it’s not too nippy, so Harry takes her out into the garden.  Nick watches them and tries to get his thoughts into some sort of order.  He folds their laundry and puts his and Harry’s t-shirts back into the basket to take back to the room, and as he’s slotting them into a drawer together he can appreciate the irony that this is somehow his fucking life, despite the fact that he’s done very little to deserve it.

He can hear rain spattering on the windows as he takes Ella’s clean clothes back to the nursery, and when he comes back into the sitting room after putting them away Harry is shivering in the kitchen and a child-sized blob of mud is sitting on a towel on the floor in the sun room.

“Didn’t think it was going to be heavy when it started,” Harry says, and Nick turns to look out the window to find that it’s gone from grey skies and a drizzle to pissing it down.  Harry strips off his damp jumper and Nick watches, mouth dry, as Harry’s thin shirt clings to his chest.  Nick reminds himself that his daughter is sitting right there and says,

“Were you two digging a well, then?  Mining for coal?”

“We may have a mud play area in the back of the garden,” Harry says, sheepishly.

“A mud play area?” says Nick, looking everywhere but at Harry’s collarbones, where little beads of water are gathering as they run down his neck.

“Bressie and Nialler and I were clearing a space to maybe put a sand pit in last week, but she seemed to like the dirt just fine, so we left it,” says Harry.  “It’s good for kids to play in the mud, my mum says.”

He walks over to Ella before Nick can ask who is meant to deal with this “mud play area” when Ella and Harry decide it is no longer interesting, which is likely to be next week.  Harry removes her muddy clothes, rolling them up with the towel she was sitting on and heading toward the washing machine after depositing Ella on the sofa.  Nick can see the fragile curve of his spine and the slope of his shoulders perfectly through the shirt, a pale strip of skin right above the line of his jeans, and his daughter is _right there_.

He picks Ella up, who is dry and warm except for the mud on her hands, and goes to run her a bath.  Harry joins them a few minutes later, minus his muddy trousers and now wearing trackies, and Nick looks at him, white shirt and pale skin against the soft moss green of the bathroom walls, and wants.  It’s as if some dam has given way inside him, and every thought that he consciously did not allow himself to have before is clamouring at the front of his brain, and they’re all shouting _look, look, look_.

Harry’s eyes catch Nick’s as he hands over Ella’s shampoo, and Nick feels the slick slide of their skin as their fingers touch against the bottle all the way to his toes.  Harry makes a cut-off choking sound in the back of his throat as Nick holds his gaze, looking at Nick like he’s forgotten what kinds of things not to think, too.  He’s looking at Nick like they don’t have to talk at all, like they’re on precisely the same page and have been for days and neither of them has anything they can say that they aren’t saying just by looking at each other.  It’s comforting and familiar, because Nick can feel the heat of it settling low in his belly and making his stomach flutter but he feels as if Harry _knows_ , the way he always knows Nick.  Nick is about to open his mouth when Harry says, inexplicably,

“I told the lads I’d go out with them tonight!”

Something dims a little—only a little—inside Nick and he turns to ladle water carefully over Ella’s soft hair, but Harry shifts so he’s kneeling behind Nick on the soft mat and his lips drag over Nick’s ear when he says,

“We should have time to talk, yeah?  And I told Liam I’d meet him at quarter past six and it’s almost five, Nick.”

Nick turns his head and Harry stays close as he does, his lips brushing along Nick’s cheek.  Nick says, “Okay,” and out of the corner of his eye he can see Harry’s dimples.  He can feel Harry’s warm chest pressed all along his back, and he repeats, “Okay.”

Harry heads out the door with a little kiss for Ella and another one for Nick, more on his mouth than not.  He darts back quickly, looking a little shocked, and Nick fights the urge to giggle, because it’s like being in primary school all over again and he can’t even bring himself to _mind_.

Nick and Ella play with her tractors and her cars (she’s a very morbid child; she keeps running one tractor over a doll that’s lying prone on the floor) and Nick cuddles up in bed with her and reads her a story when her little eyelids start to flutter.  She points half-heartedly to different things on the pages before drifting off, and Nick watches her sleep for a few minutes, her tiny chest rising and falling, her soft curls falling across her softer cheeks, before he picks her up and walks her to the crib.  He keeps watching her for a few minutes before he turns the light off, still as incredulous that she’s there as he’s ever been.

Harry comes back late, smelling of beer and crowd and a little bit of smoke.  He presses in behind Nick and kisses him sloppily on the neck, and Nick mumbles,

“Have a good night?”

“Yeah,” Harry says, shoving a leg unceremoniously between Nick’s.  “See you tomorrow.  Love you.”

Nick laughs sleepily.  “See you tomorrow, Haz.”

 

Harry apparently means it, because when Nick stumbles out of the shower in the morning Harry is in the kitchen, neatly slicing some of the peppers they’d bought the day before.  He puts them carefully in a Tupperware container that’s already got some carrots in and puts a pot of hummus on top of it, putting everything in a carrier bag and moving it to the side of the kitchen island as he makes coffee.

“Are you my housewife now?” asks Nick, eyebrows raised at the hummus.

“Yes, dear,” Harry says.  He pushes the bag towards Nick.  “Miriam’s here today so you’re going to end up having the planning meeting for next week, and it’ll run long because you’re not so anxious about coming back and checking on us anymore, and you’ll get hungry and Ian will convince everyone to order takeaway from that Indian place, which is always, _always_ a little dodge, and then you’ll be annoying about it for two days and complain you feel bloated and weird.  It is in my interest to avoid that.”

Nick considers this.  “Possibly accurate.”

Harry grins.  Nick looks at him.  The kitchen lights are highlighting the sleep-creases on his cheek and he looks a little worse for wear from the night before, though his curls are pushed back by a headband and he’s clearly washed his face.  His eyes are droopy and he’s wearing a t-shirt of Nick’s with a hole at the collar and also tatty socks that go halfway up his skinny calves, which are too pale by half.  His toes are curling against the cold kitchen tile; Nick can see them moving under the cotton.

He looks a mess, probably the worst Nick has seen him look in ages.  Nick wants him desperately and knows he’s about to say just that and he’s been thinking that surely there’d be something momentous about this, but instead it’s Harry looking like he belongs in Nick’s kitchen, a little bit of the juice from the peppers glistening on his fingers and his curls in a weird sideways quiff, and there’s nothing momentous about it at all.

“Aimee and I talked about the time you came back from tour to stay at the old flat,” Nick says, a little cautiously because he’s ready to say something, but he’s not stupid or brave enough to just say it.

“Yeah?” says Harry.  He gives Nick a sly smile and his eyes go a little unfocused, as if he’s remembering, and Nick remembers the arch of his neck when he threw his head back and has to shake his head a little, putting his hand carefully on Harry’s hip.

“When you went back we said—”

“That was _such_ a long time ago, Grimmy,” says Harry, looking pained and sheepish, almost like he can’t believe them.

“Ages,” says Nick, and his eyes drift to Harry’s mouth.  “And now you’re here with us and things are different, maybe?  And I’m happy.”

He was supposed to say something after that, _I’m happy that Ella’s so happy,_ or _I’m happy you’re with us until the summer_ , maybe, but he manages to stop himself because that captures it just fine— _I’m happy_.  He is.

“Nick,” says Harry, looking a little vulnerable and a lot uncertain.

He presses his hip into Nick’s hand and leans forward slowly, a little awkward, even, and then pulls back slightly to look at Nick in the eye and Nick thinks he cannot possibly wait _one more second_ and he lurches forward and kisses him.

Everything about Harry goes pliant.  He turns a little so his other hip is resting his weight against the kitchen island, and his arms go up and land heavily on Nick’s shoulders.  His lips are soft and his tongue is softer, tiny kitten licks that Nick lets flutter against his lips for a second before opening his mouth.

Harry surges forward, going from boneless to demanding, pressing Nick against the counter and tugging at the hair at the nape of Nick’s neck, cradling Nick’s jaw in his long fingers.  He kisses him hard for a few seconds and then pulls back just the tiniest bit and says, mouth still against Nick’s, “You have to go to the station.”

Nick laughs because Harry wouldn’t let them talk about this when they had an hour yesterday, but apparently thought it was a perfectly reasonable thing to do to wake up at 5am when they’d have ten minutes and kiss Nick like they should melt into each other and keep at it all day, just before reminding him he has to go to work.

Harry looks a little flushed and embarrassed, and he says, “I was going to wait until you got back today but I was with the lads yesterday and I kept thinking I’d come home and find you in bed and you’d be all warm from sleeping and when I woke up this morning and saw you I knew I shouldn’t but—”

“Darling,” says Nick, pulling him close and circling his hands around Harry’s slim waist, pulling him forward so they’re pressed together from their chest to their knees.  “You’ve just described how I feel every fucking day I wake up to you in bed.”

Harry beams at him, smile lighting up his whole face, and says, “Even if you’re not anxious about getting home quickly to check on us anymore.  You should come back as soon as you finish.”

“Sooner, if I can bribe Ian with your wife-hummus to take over the meeting so I can skive off,” Nick says, and he doesn’t even feel too soppy as he presses his lips against Harry’s again, soft and unhurried and undemanding like a good set of second (third) kisses should be, before he heads toward the door.

Harry trails after him, and they kiss against the door frame, Harry’s long fingers bunching Nick’s jumper up at his hips.  Nick strangely feels as if he’s been doing this his whole life, and could keep doing it forever.

“Have a good day, sweetheart,” Harry trills mockingly, waving from the door in his boxers and t-shirt and silly socks. 

“Oh, fuck off,” Nick says, laughing as he walks away.  He turns his face down to hide it, but he’s sure Harry can see that Nick’s happiness barely fits in his chest.


	5. Chapter 5

The inimitable Rose has convinced me that this is the only logical place to split this for posting, and she is correct. The next and final chapter will end up being a fucking monster as a result but there are no rules against monsters in ridiculous fucking kidfic, I guess, and I didn't want to make everyone wait until I finished writing the whole thing.

...WIPs, after this we are probably done professionally, jfc.

Thank you all for your lovely comments and for keeping me sane as I whine on Twitter about declarations of love over the radio and the inexcusable soppiness of this.

 

(update is in chapter four thanks to my shenanigans last week/lack of common-sense thinking earlier; thanks to @ladzfm for suggesting I make that obvious to people who are more logical than I.)


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